I am hesitant to write about this topic. The topic itself is not concerning, but rather the person that authored it. The reason is because he was a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and later became affiliated with the National Socialist Teachers League. Due to his academic career in Germany before and during World War II, he was associated with, and most likely a member of, this party.
Most people do not understand that this authoritarian regime sprung from a populist movement. Yet, despite using words like “socialist” and “workers” in their name, the party ultimately became the only party in power. Using this party, Hitler ruled Germany with the iron fist of extreme nationalism, racial ideology, and authoritarianism.
The person I am referring to is Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He was an Austrian biologist who would end up being quite influential in his ability to conceptualize and solve for organic growth models with equations on systems theory that we still use today. To be fair to the man, no one knows where his sympathies were. He left Germany after the war and moved to the United States. He did end up writing papers against totalitarian systems of government. He advocated for openness, interconnectedness, and thinking that was more lateral and less hierarchical.
So I do not know where this man was ideologically. I like to say that if I was alive and living in Germany, I would have been a member of the resistance and one of the many that were plotting an assassination attempt of Hitler and his regime. However, that is bravado. We need to be honest with ourselves and our natures. The reality is that many German people were living in fear, complacency, or both.
I have read a lot on this subject, and based on what I see of the herd mentality in our modern day and age, not much has changed. The likelihood of people speaking out, acting out, or fighting against those with demonstrable power is very low. So it is most likely that Bertalanffy was like most everyone else in Germany—keep your head down and hope these nut jobs go away. Do what you can to keep your job, do your work, and whatever you do, do not ask questions or raise your hand. Most everyone was unwilling to carry the White Rose and die for the cause. I have no idea of the truth of this matter, so I can only go by what the man wrote and what he has been recorded to say.
With this giant asterisk clearly stated, I do want to point out one of his theories that is quite remarkable. Being a biologist, he had studied theories of other scientists in his field. The work of Hans Driesch was particularly noteworthy. He did a lot of research with sea urchin embryos. He figured out that if he separated early-stage embryonic cells, he discovered that these cells could still develop into a complete organism. He concluded that development of organisms was therefore not deterministic. Rather, there was a force that guided these cells, and that force would cause them to produce their intended outcome regardless of many different variables.
Bertalanffy would later elaborate on this theory, which he called equifinality. The concept being that there is no one path to organic development, but rather many different and separate paths to success. The path was nowhere near as important as the flexibility and adaptability the organism had in following one of many different trajectories. Bertalanffy, in his genius, developed this into what is now known as “General Systems Theory,” which I was required to study in my early days in college as part of an Organizational Communications course.
Now here is where the theory has a very relevant application to our lives. One of the conclusions of his work is that we cannot evaluate direct cause-and-effect relationships from closed systems and apply them to organic growth. Just because there is an initial condition and then a repeatable final state of a closed system does not mean that is the only viable path for an organic system to grow.
To provide an example relevant today, just because the company Notion became a viral success loved by influencers everywhere does not mean that it is the only way to successfully grow a system. The reality is that there are many divergent paths, and they all have the potential to be highly effective. Just because Wayfair completely dominated SEO search performance with Google keywords does not mean that is the only path to success for an online retailer. The theory of equifinality gives us the permission to believe otherwise. It gives us the permission to believe that similar results can be achieved with different initial conditions and in many different ways.
So next time you are in a meeting and the snot-nosed kid from marketing tells you that he knows “the right way” to do it, or the “way it is supposed to happen,” keep in mind that he may have one way of doing it, but by no means is it the only way. No organic system has ever been, or ever will be, subject to the cause-and-effect rules of a closed system.
In essence, there is no single right way to do it when talking about an open system. Open systems, by their nature, are chaotic. There is no initial starting point, there is no single path, and there is never a predictable outcome. I think it is good that people want to seek the optimal solution, but this theory of Bertalanffy leads me to one conclusion: the idea that organic growth is far more influenced by execution, adaptability, and perseverance than the initial choice of path.
