The Chaos Theory of Careers: a user's guide

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

Conversely, discussing happenstance in a client's life can often serve to relax him or her and remove the self-imposed burden that some clients carry to present all of their career decisions and history in strictly rational terms. When clients present their history in rational terms, they are very often overlooking or ignoring the chance events, and the opportunity can be lost to discuss strategies to stimulate future positive chance events.

Counselors might wish to ask questions about unplanned and unpredictable events when asking their clients about their past. They can normalize chance events by citing statistics that show that most people report that chance events have played a major role in their life. Further-more, they could work with clients to develop strategies to capitalize on chance events in the future (Pryor & Bright, 2005).

Phase Shifts and Career Counseling

In the scenarios presented earlier, a small change in the behavior of one of the fans could have blown the ball out of the room. This could change the dynamics of the system radically. The function of the system, the person's behavior, might change from an investigation of gravity to a search for a Ping-Pong ball. Similarly in careers, people can undergo radical changes in career direction. Sometimes, this is caused by significant external events such as a major workplace injury. Alternatively, it can be more subtle: When an employee has attended countless pointless meetings previously and then is called on to attend one more, it may be the "breaking point" that provokes the employee to resign.

Using Attractors in Career Counseling

Just as a single job in a particular organization can be seen as a single set of interrelated influences or constraints (on a system), so, too, the person's work history, or career, can be seen as a more complex system. According to chaos theory, a common theme is patterns within patterns (Kauffman, 1995). Understanding how such patterns at differing levels of generality and complexity function has given rise to the adoption of the mathematical notion of "the attractor" within chaos theory.

Attractors are descriptions of the constraints on the functioning of a system. They are called attractors because they influence behavior by drawing it in particular directions or constraining the behavior in some way. Four major types of attractors are generally recognized in chaos theory.

Point Attractor and Career Counseling

The simplest is the point attractor. The point attractor describes behavior when the object in question (a thing or person) is attracted to one specific thing or point. In Scenario 1, the floor directly below is a point attractor for the Ping-Pong ball: The ball falls directly to the ground when dropped (in the absence of any complicating influences). In career terms, the point attractor could be a particular vocational goal--such as being promoted to the next level in the corporation. Point attractors generally occur when the individual or some other agency places artificial constraints on the individual's behavior. Person-environment fit models of career decision making (e.g., Dawis & Lofquist, 1984; J. L. Holland, 1997) are examples of point attractor models. They assume there is an optimal vocational direction or space in which personal interests or other personal attributes match suitable jobs. Constraining a client's behavior by imposing a point attractor can be motivational (i.e., by setting a goal), but chaos theory reminds individuals of the need to continually revise goals as they are seeking to attain them and also to make alternative plans in the event of unforeseen circumstances becoming insuperable barriers to the fulfillment of goals.