Rogue Waves: An Ode to the Big Small

Small things create a ton of energy.

Everywhere we look right now our challenges are of vast scale: climate change, the Covid pandemic, social unrest, dissatisfaction with work: you name it, every challenge appears intractable, compounded by seemingly false narratives and unscrupulous actors.

The types of large systemic solutions and transformations that are proposed are so vast and unwieldy in scale that it seems nobody can agree, either on what the solutions might be or what mechanisms we might use to achieve them. Or what it might even take for everyone to learn what to do.

I went on the hunt for stories of big things that happen in seemingly unexplained ways and my attention was drawn to Rogue Waves. “Rogues, called 'extreme storm waves' by scientists, are those waves which are greater than twice the size of surrounding waves, are very unpredictable, and often come unexpectedly from directions other than prevailing wind and waves.”

Before 1995, scientists studied rogue waves in isolation, to try and understand how they formed.??Then the ‘New Year’s Wave’ that hit a North Sea oil platform on January 1, 1995 – a platform laden with multiple weather and ocean sensors – taught them that rogue waves emerged from conditions present in myriad small systems at play in an area of open water. They included:

?????????????Constructive interference:?when “crests, troughs and lengths” of adjacent waves “sometimes reinforce and coincide with each other.”

?????????????Focusing of wave energy:?“When waves formed by a storm develop in a water current against the normal wave direction, an interaction can take place which results in a shortening of the wave frequency. This can cause the waves to dynamically join together, forming very big 'rogue' waves.”

What these two causes demonstrate is that the convergence of small, localized conditions can summon enough energy to suddenly unleash something giant and powerful.?

Today, we’re so obsessed with scale and tackling giant, global challenges, that it’s easy to neglect the comparative ease of small intimate gatherings at human scale, where solutions can be considered, tested and generated in person. The ‘constructive interference’ or ‘focusing of wave energy’ that large numbers of small, human-scale initiatives can cause – the ‘Big Small’ that Richard Merrick and Fran Willis White refer to – can also “dynamically join together” to generate exponentially positive solutions to large scale challenges.???

And here’s the interesting thing: we don’t need to share perspective to solve these challenges. In fact, we don’t need even need to have the same intention.??If the outcome of our collaboration yields a result that satisfies my needs and your needs, albeit for different reasons, then we each get what we want and we’ve reinforced and coincided with each other. And we’re able to talk about it at an intimate scale. Do enough of this either within our communities or our organizations and we might surprise ourselves and start to solve some really big hairy challenges – or generate some rogue waves of our own, if you will.

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Quotes from: What is a Rogue Wave? by the NOAA

Thanks Matt Arnold for the conversation that sent me on a hunt for rogue waves!