A little over a year ago, I was given the incredible honor of being the Master of Ceremonies and speaking at the Centennial Celebration of The Burley Rotary Club. During my opening remarks, I shared some thoughts about the term “Butterfly Effect.”

 

 

 

I was first introduced to the “Butterfly Effect” concept when I saw a trailer for an Ashton Kutcher movie with that title back in 2004. Being curious about what it meant, I decided to look it up.

 

 

What I eventually learned is that the term Butterfly Effect is part of Chaos Theory.  It began with Edward Lorenz, an American mathematician and meteorologist, when he posed a question at a Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  The question: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Having lived in Brazil for two years, I decided to keep reading.

 

 

The concept behind this provocative question was to illustrate the idea that small variances can have profound and widely divergent effects on an outcome.  Since systems are sensitive, outcomes can be unpredictable when introduced to a slight change.

 

Edward Lorenz made this discovery when he was experimenting with a weather model he created in order to try to predict the weather.  He inputted a variable with an approximate value of 0.506 and got an outcome.  Later, he inputted the full precision value of 0.506127, and the outcome of the model was completely different. 

 

We hear the phrase that big doors swing on small hinges, but in this case, a difference of 0.000127, slightly over a one ten-thousandth part, created an entirely different outcome.  Hence, the Butterfly Effect being part of Chaos Theory was born.  Maybe the real lesson here is that you can’t predict the weather?

 

In this case, I applied the Butterfly Effect to the organization and creation of The Burley Rotary Club slightly over one hundred years ago (A special thank you to the Pocatello Rotary Club for sponsoring us!).  I wish it was possible to talk to those original members, united by a simple idea of providing “Service Above Self” in their small community, and show them the figurative tornados of change for good that they have unleashed in people’s lives here in Burley and throughout the world, all thanks to the Power of Rotary.  I am pretty sure they had no idea what they unleashed back then.