Description:

Abstract:

For three centuries, Western thought lived under Newton’s clockwork paradigm—a
worldview of predictability, control, and linear causation. It shaped institutions from
Madison’s checks and balances to Taylor’s scientific management, defining modernity.
But successive scientific revolutions—statistical thermodynamics, relativity, quantum
mechanics, evolution, game theory, DNA, and AI—revealed a radically different
universe: dynamic, probabilistic, and deeply complex. We have shifted from Newton’s
clocks to what Popper called a “cloud world,” marked by emergence, interdependence,
and irreducible uncertainty.

This talk traces how these revolutions reshaped our understanding of reality and
explores their leadership implications: why navigating 21st-century challenges demands
embracing complexity, cultivating resilience, and designing organizations that work with,
rather than against, dynamic systems.

Bio:

Julio Mario Ottino is a researcher, engineering scientist, academic leader, educator, artist, and author. He is Founder and Co-Director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, McCormick Institute Professor of Engineering, W.P. Murphy Professor of Chemical Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern at the Kellogg School of Management in Northwestern University. Widely recognized as a world authority on mixing, chaos, and complexity, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As Dean of Engineering, he launched major university-wide initiatives, programs, degrees, and centers spanning design, energy and sustainability, synthetic biology, human–computer interaction, and entrepreneurship. His most recent book, The Nexus (MIT Press, 2022) was a category winner in Engineering and Technology, from the Association of American Publishers