Prof. Dr. M. Denker. Mathematician, PennState University, USA
Uncertainty is dominant in many economic decisions and in sensemaking.
Strategic planning and self-organization overcome these problems by effective usage of laws of randomness:
Risk Analysis, Optimization, Analytical Statistics, Randomized Algorithms and Networks.
(Random) things should be taken as they come. Nevertheless one should take care that things (randomly) come as one wishes them to come.
Complete randomness can yield remarkably ordered and beautiful results when paired with selection, as demonstrated by evolution.
There exists positive as well as negative random events. You can say, there exists luck and bad luck. Personally when I think about randomness I usually tend to connect this with positive events and success.
Is everything a chance or could we occasionally (randomly) make a forecast for the chance?
In today's dynamic and complex marketplaces, randomness and uncertainty are NOT an exception. They are normality. Organizations often go on trying to control their environments. But the attempt to control complex systems such as markets and companies is quite simply doomed - and bound to end in tears. Planning fails in uncertain markets. And so does top-down command and control management. The secret to success, instead, is to build organizations that can strive in any possible future. Unfortunately, only few companies have achieved this kind of adaptivity and robustness. This is how you can get there. First: Challenge EVERYONE in your organization to think and act as entrepreneurs. Ruthlessly. And second: Make all the information and data available to your people. ALL of it! Because information is like oxygen for entrepreneurs. It will allow your people to connect to the purpose or their organizations, to fulfil their potential and to drive truly exceptional performance.
Quantum mechanics says that there is a finite probability that this last bottle of water that you have emptied in the desert will be refilled in the next instant with water molecules tunneling to you from a spring several 100 miles away. But there is no comfort in this. It is not only that the probability is so unimaginably small -- it is also comparable to the probability that the bottle will be refilled with molecules coming from a septic tank in the same area.
A famous prayer says: "Give us grace to accept the things that cannot be changed, courage to change things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." Randomness...some events in life occur just by chance or random, whereas some others are based on deeper laws we don't understand. Wise is who knows what is randomness and what is incomprehensibility.
The fatalist calls it destiny, the rationalist randomness.
Randomness is the unexplainable place of human logic!
Your are at an exhibition and wonder that the unknown person that you accidentally talk to knows your friend oversee. Is this random?
You discover that a member of your team is a close friend of a high-ranked politician. Is this random?
Empirical research (Milgram et al.) show that each person knows another person "via 6 corners". Therefore, between two arbitrary persons there exist only 6 persons. By considering this, the examples above are not really randomly any more. Sometimes a suitable model like the small world-model described here can put Randomness in another light. If one looks properly, random events are not always as random as they appear to be.
Randomness is of crucial importance for the evolution, both the cosmological and the biological one, as well as for our daily life: Protean behavior is widespread, also in humans. The Vikings, for instance, recognized chance as the true ruler of their world. Randomness is therefore not only the ultimate source of diversity in our world, but also the basis of freedom (as pointed out by Tiessen-Favier in his book "The Power of Randomness").
Ein Musiker sagte mir vor einiger Zeit: "In der Musik gibt es keinen Zufall". Das ist eine sehr interessante Aussage. Und es stimmt, die Harmonie
in der Musik kann analytisch wiedergegeben werden ... verglichen zu anderen komplexen, chaotischen und zufälligen Ereignissen.
Der Zufall ist ein zentraler Begriff im Umgang mit Daten. Ich war neugierig,
den Begriff der Zufälligkeit durch andere Augen zu sehen. Hier können Sie ein Paar Zitate lesen. Schreiben Sie mir bitte eine Mail und sagen
Sie mir, wie Sie Zufall verstehen!