What Exactly Is the Butterfly Effect and How Does It Work?
The following chapter is from Limit Breaker: 101 Short Stories, Essays, and Insights to Improve Communication Skills
When I was working in IT, my team was managing a system for USCIS.
It was a very complex system with TONS of moving parts.
Difficult to manage.
One day, we had a small bug in the system.
It was very small.
So small to a point where we thought it was no biggie.
Decided to ignore it.
4 Months Later…
I’m sleeping on a Saturday morning, until I get a call at 6:40 am.
It’s my manager.
He says ‘Armani, we need you at work ASAP. We have a p1!’
A p1 is when our system is in a critical state.
On the verge of failure.
This causes our company to miss deadlines & clients to get pissed.
This was bad.
We ended up working a fuck ton the next week.
12 hours a day with the business analysts, systems engineers, infrastructure engineers etc. to find the root cause.
After a few weeks, we found out what happened.
‘What happened bro?’
You remember that little bug that I decided to ignore a few months back?
‘Yea.’
Well, that bug had compounded over time & turned into a freaking monster.
That was the reason our system almost collapsed.
The butterfly effect is the concept that a flap of a butterfly’s wings can add up, compound exponentially & lead to a tornado on the other side of the world.
This is nonlinear thinking.
Little things are often ignored.
But it is the little things that lead to the big things.
Remember the butterfly effect when you sleep on little things.
Machines & people have certain similarities.
It’s like if we can learn how a machine functions or destructs, we can about ourselves in the process.
That day of covering up the small bug led to a p1.
That’s when the concept of the butterfly effect became crystallized.
Has a small thing ever led to a big thing in YOUR life?
Answer the question.
You’ll be surprised by the responses.
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