A version of David Snowden’s birthday party story illustrating the differences among chaotic, ordered and complex systems is on YouTube. It isn’t the most compete rendition of the story but serves as a good introduction to some key terms of complexity theory. For a fuller account listen to one of his podcasts on the Cognitive Edge site.

Whenever I’ve listened to his story, I’ve always admired how spot-on David Snowden has captured the élan of educationalists: their insistence on a project plan with the mandatory learning objectives and requisite milestones with which to compare with outcome statements in order to judge progress.

Here’s the URL in case the video clip doesn’t show up for in Facebook or wherever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg