Watching Raindrops Form
Joe Kagle

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Sit back and watch the beginning of a hard rain on the window pane of the automobile. You have plenty of time. It is just beginning. Those you love are inside the air conditioned business, negotiating some deal. You sit alone and watch the raindrops form.

The rain hits the window, makes a mark, two dots of water, a space, another dot, another space, and then two droplets ending the pattern. It is the Morris code of the clouds. The next rain drop is a two, space, one, space, one droplet configuration. You do not fathom any overall numerical sequence to the drops hitting the glass, and yet you keep counting. It makes no difference how hard you try to see and predict what is or will happen. The process is beyond knowledge. Finally, you use Michael Crichton’s criteria in his novel, Prey, for coming up with a solution to what happens in nature: “Leave it to nature and just watch the results. Sometimes, like a computer program, the solution comes from the process and not from setting a pattern upon what is happening.” Crichton’s theme was that you cannot predict the outcome of an action as the process is adjusting all the time to the environment of the action. It is Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty. . What you do is be conscious about setting any action in motion when you do not even understand the elements that you are working with. That would have been good advice for Bush’s decision about going to war with Iraq. What you get from just observation now is not the prediction of how many droplets will be upon the window at any given rain drop hitting it but the overall pattern of hits and dispersals. Drops hit the window, skip a space, leave some sign (a single or double droplet) and then leave an ending (one or two more droplets). It all depends on the force of the drop as it hits and what is on the window from earlier droplets. The latter is the “history” of the event.

I used to do this with dust patterns in the air, trying to see some pattern to their movement in the dancing light. It too was a futile but interesting experience. Finally, what I did was use Chaos Theory and place marks on a page, as if they were individual dust particles, and then, arbitrarily, join them with lines until patterns emerged and crisscrossed the page. It was not the pattern that the dust made but one of my making, yet it was fascinating to the mind’s eye and gave me a glimpse into the randomness of nature’s actions. I am sure that earliest man looked up at the stars and joined the dots to make some reason from reasonless patterns or groups of patterns. We do this today. “Oh, look up there, that is the “Big Dipper” in the West, the “Dragon” in the Orient, and the “Chariot of the Gods” in the Middle East”.

To understand the motion of the sun and moon, we gave them gender differences and had different, made-up celestial characters ride them across the sky. In my father’s time, man believed that science was going to tell us about how the world reacts to stimuli but now we see that when we figure out one virus it mutants into another and then another so that we cannot predict the future of a virus. It is the “uncertainty” principle by which all of us work now. If you are a leader of men, you do not have one style to lead. You use Situational Leadership. That is, if the employee knows nothing, you tell them; if the employee knows a little, you show them; if the employee knows as much as you do, you work with them; and if the employee knows more than you, you get out of their way and yet find them the resources to get the job done. It is no longer “x” management, a strong decision-making leader who tells employees what to do, or “y” management, a leader who is part of the group and listens to what is said and helps the total organization move forward. The only thing that we could have predicted is that there would be change in leadership styles and what was needed for the 20th century is no longer what is needed for the 21st century. The environment has shaped leaders as the leaders try to shape the environment. When there is not this give and take, then one or the other dies or forms a symbiotic relationship where both elements change to the betterment of the new other. That is our present global village.

To predict the future of this new global village is like trying to find a definitive answer to what the next raindrop will be. Today, we need leaders who are schooled into situational leadership and beyond. We need “mothers” as our leaders, no matter what gender they are. You don’t believe me? Just watch the athletes calling out, “Hi, Mom?” over your oversize television. They know! They are the raindrops of a new storm.

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