The Chaos Theory of Careers: a user's guide

Career Development Quarterly, June, 2005 by Jim E.H. Bright, Robert G.L. Pryor

Emergence involves going up a level or more in description to look for patterns of behavior that appear to emerge from the complexity. Inevitably, such approaches appear to lack the scientific precision of measurement that is often claimed in reductionist approaches, and the forms of description are typically qualitative, such as narrative, analogy, and metaphor. In such an endeavor, the emphasis becomes to describe the system behavior in ways that are meaningful to clients at their current stage and understanding of themselves, as opposed to trying to "nail" the essence of a person or making long-term predictions. In pursuing this goal, career counselors recognize the limitations of their knowledge, in that they can never fully know what influences a person or how that person will respond in the future. However, career counselors can attempt to identify some of the emergent patterns of behavior and link these to past career events. In this way, clients can come to a greater understanding of how their life story is playing out; this, in turn, can provide them with some ideas for future career exploration.

Emergence as a counseling process essentially makes sense of the client's past behavior in terms of themes, narratives, preoccupations, and the unpredictable nature of a range of influences in the past. The role of counselors in this process is to assist their clients to understand their career behavior and to highlight the range of influences, including happenstance, on their careers. Then, techniques for capitalizing on some of these influences, events, and themes can be developed with the client (e.g., Krumboltz & Levin, 2004).

Nonlinearity and Career Counseling

As J. H. Holland (1995) demonstrated, nonlinear equations prevent the description of behavior in terms of aggregates or averages, because very small changes in an input variable can lead to dramatic changes in the output. This is the essence of nonlinearity: There is potential disproportion between a change in one part of a complex system and its subsequent effect in another part of the system. Strogatz (2003) argued that most things in nature are nonlinear, whereas linear equations tend to describe idealized situations (such as somebody dropping a Ping-Pong ball in the absence of any complicating factors like puppies and fans). Strogatz argued that "every major unsolved problem in science from consciousness to cancer to the collective craziness of the economy is non linear" (p. 182). In nonlinear systems such as career behavior, small or seemingly trivial events can have significant career implications. For example, a young engineer working for a construction company has one sick day off in the first 2 years that he is with the company. However, that is the day an urgent overseas project meeting is held. A team is assembled from those attending the meeting and within a few days is sent to work on the project. Subsequently, the project is a great success, and all those on the team are promoted ahead of our only slightly sick, but certainly hapless, young engineer who only missed one meeting.