There is a strong school of thought holding forth this premise: chaos does not actually exist. What passes for chaos, say some, is simply a lack of complete understanding of the contributing factors in a seemingly chaotic process. "No," say others, "chaos exists and can never be fully controlled nor completely understood." Take this old example. Pour a bucket containing 100 golf balls onto a gymnasium floor and predict the final resting place of each of the balls. "Impossible," say the chaotic theory proponents, "because the system at work (in this case, gravity, mass, variable air currents, floor surface, etc.), produces chaos, and things chaotic can never be accurately predicted." "Not so," say the anti-chaos zealots. "With enough data at hand, and understanding of the dynamic processes occurring, the path of each ball could be accurately predicted." Given my experience with the flight of golf balls, I tend to side with the chaos proponents on this one. Nevertheless, the following statements can be made with certainty: much of what passes for chaos in business today is not chaos at all. It is a failure to control processes that are imminently controllable. Which brings us to three absolutes:
- Failure
to control processes (whether or not you call it chaos), always
results in defects and loss of quality.
- Compromises
in quality always result in customer dissatisfaction.