Apart from the occasional ice age or natural disaster such as a hurricane, earthquake or tidal wave, our species has enjoyed a reasonably stable and linear existence. We have evolved appropriately to appreciate three spatial and one time dimension, with a sense of past, present and future. By and large most of us think in such terms and do not step into a world that exhibits ten or more dimensions, and yet all of our modern business and commerce problems tend to be multi-dimensional, and therefore well beyond our ability to grasp as a whole. The reality is that everything in nature is multi-dimensional, non-linear and chaotic. From the clustering of the constellations in the night sky to lightening storms and the evolution of life itself, all are governed by chaotic mechanisms. For any life to be successful it has to live on the edge of death, for you and I, our hearts are always close to fibrillation, and if they are not, then they wouldn't work. At a more prosaic level we see people in our families being born, getting married and dieing in clusters, we see our domestic appliances failing at the same time and we see car accidents clustered in twos and threes. Perhaps more evidently the occurrence of chaos is really visible on road networks. It isn't by accident that you can stand and wait for a taxi, or a bus for 20 minutes and not see one, and then five or six come at once. It is not by accident that on freeways the traffic naturally bunches and comes in clusters. It turns out to be a fundamental result of a chaotic system that sees intelligent entities making independent decisions based on the actions of others.

How come chaos is generally unrecognised, and has not been noticeable, reported or deemed significant to date? Well it is all down to the speed and perception! 100 years ago the chaos of the world passed us by, our frame of life was short compared to occurrence of chaotic events. Today however, speed of communication and physical travel are making our lifetime perceptibly much shorter, and therefore chaotic events are becoming very noticeable. The recent dot.com crash is a good example of a situation that has occurred many times before, the most recent being the industrial revolution. In the year 1900 there were over 1,000 manufactures of automobiles in the United States, by 1930 there were four. If we consider the industrial revolution to have spanned a 100 year time period, thousands and thousands of companies were created, the vast majority died and only a very, very few survived. Well, in the dot.com world that is exactly what happened in less than ten years. How come? Technology is now moving at such a pace that it is overtaking the human ability to adopt and adapt to the changes that it creates.

In a linear world we have always looked at a vast field of variables or influencing factures in a situation, picked out the three or four key (or biggest) items, usually the most visible, and we have analysed and assessed the situation. We have then made a decision on that basis which often results in a single number answer, or a simple yes/no decision. Incredibly this simple minded linear approach has served us well and resulted in most of our key advances and achievements. But, that kind of approach, that kind of logic, can now lead to massive failures! We are talking butterfly wings causing a hurricane. In a predominantly non-linear and chaotic world a small perturbation can cause a massive change. This is now a world where some insignificant parameter or factor that we choose to overlook is actually very significant and can have dire consequences.

If we take the dot.com bust for a moment as a most recent occurrence and analyse the real cause of the collapse, we can list a very limited set of axioms and conditions:

1. Human greed had a large part to play
2. The lemming effect where one success heralded another - apparently
3. A blind belief that old market and business principles could at last be abandoned and profit really did not matter
4. The old economy conspired to protect itself, to slow down progress and bit back