Thank goodness for complexity!

Francesco Di Lauro talks with  Ernesto Illy

Order is good, disorder bad. But is that really how things stand?
Ernesto Illy, president of illycaffè, a firm universally acknowledged has having sired 4 of the 7 most important inventions in the sector over the last 100 years, reconsiders the issue and puts forth an alternative point of view on the traditionally dichotomous pair.

Let’s try quantifying the price of certainty.
In Italy at least 20 billion euro a year get spent on magicians, soothsayers, wizards and the like to buy a false sense of security, to allay one’s fear of the future, to obtain some facile reassurance. Parallel to the clash between certainty and uncertainty there’s yet an even more ardent struggle between freedom and fatalism. Over the centuries fatalism has been the banner of many a religious or philosophical creed, the popularity of which has depended to no mean extent on the contention of being able to predict the future, of considering it as having being preordained, and hence allaying any sense of foreboding for what may be held in store. As different as these views may have been on a lot of other scores, what they shared was a firm belief in cause-effect relationships.
Even science has succumbed to this conception. Newton’s deterministic model, for instance, was an attempt to apply unchanging laws and mathematical formulae to explain and account for the past, present, as well as the future.
That’s not to say that science hasn’t evolved since then. Technological progress has been rampant and ever more sophisticated models have been worked out to come to grips with the world we live in. And yet, if we stop and consider, we see that science has lost its sway, while mysticism daily gains new ground. Why? Probably because modern-day science acknowledges complexity, while vagueness and uncertainty are generally not gladly tolerated.
When indeterminism first put in its appearance, the scientific community was torn by controversy and even personal tragedy ensued, as in the case of Boltzmann who committed suicide in Trieste in 1906. It was a time when physicists were firmly convinced that the laws of physics had to be based on undisputable facts, on infallible principles. And then along comes this Austrian scientist who throws a spanner into the works, who reckons that probability is the key to understanding nature and its laws. Scoffed at by his peers, the man who had “discovered” the atom ended up committing suicide.

Another physicist and philosopher, David Ruelle, demonstrated that there’s no replicating the same shot in a game of billiards.
Despite perfectly similar conditions and regardless of the identical degree of elasticity of each ball as it strikes the other, and even though individual trajectories may be perfectly plotted using mathematical equations, the outcome of any one shot will never be the same as another. There are in fact imponderables that simply cannot be fully taken into account as, for instance, the degree of smoothness of the tip of the stick, or the friction that comes into play when the stick hits the ball, or the friction occurring between different surfaces when they come into contact with each other. All these variables and many more come into play and make for a certain, or should I say uncertain, degree of indeterminacy so that an actual trajectory can never really be accurately calculated and hence predicted beforehand.

But as much as indeterminacy may be a source of anxiety because of the unpredictability of events, that hence lie beyond our control, what often escapes us is that it also has a highly positive side.
Dynamic processes are in fact a source of FREEDOM. Indeed, human CREATIVITY and the possibility of innovation itself depends largely on the range of options available to us and on freedom of action. In his book “The Act of Creation” Koestler makes an insightful comparison between creativity and jokes. The story in the first part of any joke unfolds on a certain plane, and then there’s suddenly an unexpected twist that shifts the story onto a totally different plane. This unforeseen turn of events releases energy, in this case in the form of laughter.

All those whom we acknowledge as being MASTERS of LIFE are endowed with great creativity and know how to put it into practice. But they also know that the price to pay for being creative is uncertainty.
Thus the circle closes: it’s undeniable that the world about us is unpredictable, and that’s something we’ve got to learn to live and cope with. Natural or social phenomena, not least of all market trends, cannot be fitted into a mathematically determinable pattern, and no cause-effect model will ever wholly account for them. If we want our future to be less unpredictable then we’ve got to be willing to make it ourselves, or at least attempt to. And that’s where being INNOVATIVE counts. It means getting down to business seriously and not letting circumstances that are in any case beyond our control overwhelm us. It means getting actively engaged on a terrain where human FREEDOM is confronted with the challenges of COMPLEXITY. Rather than inspiring a sense of foreboding, chaos can thus be turned into an opportunity, representing a forward driving force and not a hammer ever threatening to beat us down or drive us back into the darkness of the caves in which our forebearers took refuge.