As for chaos theory, you might enjoy Surfing the Edge of Chaos. I wrote a book note about it here:
http://www.shearonforschools.com/surfing_the_edge_of_chaos.htm

Have you ever heard of chaos theory and historical determinism? I don’t know a lot about it but the gist that I get from these two concepts is that there are both incremental changes in organizations and drastic events that radically alter them.

How does an organization keep its values, strengths, etc. while undergoing both forces of change?

Political parties struggle with this all of the time. Professions, and I might argue all organizations must deal with the uncertainty of the world to some extent to survive and flourish.

A practical example could be: you have a team with excellent morale, however measured. There is cohesiveness, trust, the works. A new teammate enters the group and the dynamic radically changes for the worse. The team becomes strained in its relationships and performance suffers.

Another example is entropic forces causing a team to gradually lose focus and fall apart over time. In the sixties there was the peace movement. In our time we’ve seen these same people become the Baby Boomers of Ill Repute. “Flower meets Power” to steal one of Volkswagon’s Beetle slogans.

How can an organization expect to roll with these kinds of change forces?

That term hasn’t left my mind since you brought it up. What a precise way to capture these kinds of strengths of character in a more neutral but understandable way. Are there any brief surveys/interview questions that a coach could use to get a snapshot of psycap? In my opinion, the briefer such a tool is the better for a quick picture of what’s going on with someone’s mind. Schools have such a tool for learning called Curriculum-Based Measurement. It is an instrument that can be fine-tuned to meet the needs of students. A similar assessment could work for helping lawyers feel better.

Maybe someone could keep data on the relationships among law students’ psycap after PP interventions and that of control groups. It would be interesting to see, for example, if lawyers’ PsyCap submeasures like optimism/hope and so on increased with certain interventions. Also what if certain interventions or practices had unusual effects?

Other data might be attrition numbers, that is the number of students leaving for any reason, after first-year…and other more traditional data that admissions offices keep.

I’d like to follow this story more closely, if you are inclined to write more on the PsyCap movement.

Thanks for your thoughts!

I also think using data on student well-being to guide institutional change can help. Both of the schools I’m working with are using a version of Krieger & Sheldon’s instrument as a way to monitor their efforts to improve student well-being.