I was reading something interesting the other day about Chaos Theory, and I thought I’d share it with you. The team at 42courses and I have always been huge fans of behavioural science. We spend a lot of time looking for the underlying reasons why people do what they do. It reminded me of a mistake made by a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz back in 1961. Lorenz was trying to predict the weather using an early computer. To save a bit of time, he rounded a number in his code. Instead of typing .506127, he just typed .506. It was a microscopic change, but it completely broke his simulation. That tiny numerical tweak generated two entirely different weather systems. Lorenz called it the Butterfly Effect. It is the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. A very small input creating a massive, unpredictable output. Most marketers absolutely hate this idea. We like certainty. We want to treat marketing like Newtonian physics. We build rigid models assuming that if we put £1 in, we will neatly get £3 out. But human behaviour is not a logical machine. It is chaotic. “Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb When we (marketers and business people) try to control the weather, we usually fail. In the marketing world, we often spend months arguing over the exact shade of a brand colour or polishing a media spreadsheet to perfection. We make massive bets on things that are far too well thought out. The problem is, if you do that, you are just doing exactly what everyone else is doing. You aren’t being creative; you are just being compliant. I’ve always thought about it like this: anyone can have a basic idea. But if you have a really interesting idea that actually holds value, then it becomes creative. And if you execute that creativity, it becomes innovation. To innovate, you have to try things differently. Instead of blowing your budget on one giant, logical campaign, you are often much better off trying a dozen tiny, illogical things. There is a brilliant piece of behavioural research by psychologists Gerard Seijts and Gary Latham that backs this up. They ran a virtual experiment where teams had to increase the market share of a fictional company. The simulation ran for 13 virtual years. Halfway through, the researchers introduced an external shock factor to mimic the real, chaotic business world. The teams were split into three groups: 1. The “Do Your Best” Group: They were given no real direction, just told to do their best. 2. The Performance Group: They were given a rigid, clear target to increase market share to 21%. 3. The Learning Group: They were simply told to discover and implement six or more different strategies. Essentially, they were told to try a bunch of stuff. Before I tell you the results, it is worth pointing out that the second group (the one given a strict, rigid numerical target) is exactly how 99% of businesses are run today. So, how did they do when the chaos hit? The “Do Your Best” group managed to grow the business by a modest 7%. The Performance Group, our typical modern business model, actually shrank the business by 7%. But the Learning Group, the ones who tested multiple different inputs, survived the chaos. They grew the business by a staggering 59%. The group that tested multiple different inputs survived the chaos. They massively outperformed the group that fixated on a single, rigid target. This isn’t just true in simulations. Researchers ran a similar trial in a real-world call centre. They split the sales team into two groups. Group 1 was given very simple instructions: stick to the provided sales script. Group 2 started with the same script, but they also had regular information-sharing sessions. They held problem-solving meetings, worked on what they had learned, and actively adapted their behaviour. In less than four months, Group 2 had double the close rate of Group 1. Trying different things helps you find the asymmetric outcomes. Changing the default option on your website, making your product slightly harder to buy, or altering the context of your pricing. These are the small, unconventional changes that create massive ripples. You cannot control the weather, but you can test the butterflies. If you want to understand the delightfully chaotic way humans actually make decisions, and discover a few proven strategies to test, take a look at our course here: Applied Behavioural Science. P.S. (For your reference on the studies) Here are the links and context for those two studies if you want to dig into the science a bit more: The Simulation Study: This is from the foundational work on Goal Setting Theory by Gerard Seijts and Gary Latham. Their paper, “Learning versus performance goals: When should each be used?” proves that in complex, unpredictable environments, setting a learning goal (trying different strategies) massively outperforms setting a rigid performance goal. You can read the full paper PDF here: Seijts & Latham Study The Call Centre Study: This is a classic example of “Adaptive Selling” combined with team psychological safety. It highlights the difference between rigid process compliance (reading a script) and iterative problem-solving (adapting based on shared team learnings). You can read more about how adaptive selling doubles conversion rates in environments like call centres here: Adaptive Selling Research