The butterfly effect started, to my knowledge, with a japanese master commenting once somewhere that the beat of the wing of a butterfly over the ocean on the other side of the world could initiate a taifun off the coast of Japan – or something along those lines.
And it transferred into chaos theory and there describes the phenomenon of unpredictable consequences when input variables of non-linear dynamic systems are changed – where the change in consequence cannot be related to the change in the input variable.

I consider this view the lazy scientists way out. This is behaviour akin to the cat walking around the hot porridge. There is a distortion present that blinds the user to accept it as it is and not think about it to much.

The picture of the japanese master is much more descriptive and I would like to remove the blinders I referred to above by suggesting the following:

As always it is more about asking the question right brings the answer.
As there is no real understanding without differentiation I shall do that here as follows:

1. The nomenclature butterfly effect refers to a black box experience (change in input produces non-correlatable output) and is to be used if there is no pertinent interest to understand or explore the black box system.
2. The nomenclature cascade-effect refers to the context where an input enters a loaded (known or not) system and produces effects, even though we may not yet know the correlations. This nomenclature then allows to look for the loads and loading mechanisms. A cascade more aptly describes the process.

Domino layers use this effect to delight their audiences, starting with one domino falling into (a loaded system of other) dominoes. Where the loading is the arrangement of the dominoes and prevalent gravity vectors. Thus you could lift a three ton rock by tipping over one domino.

What about the atom bomb? or its descriptive – mouse traps with two ping pong balls. Who did the loading? How was it achieved?

It this thinking about a system as being a loaded one that I want to elicit with you. Once you have that you can start looking for and finding the loading pathways.

And then, to take this further, once you have the loading pathways you can view a cascade as a path of levers and then you can use the rules for levers on a 1:1 basis.
On an aside: A lever is also the integral of all pressure points in that lever system, its just that the formula is so much easier and more elegant to use. 😉

Our worklihood is still and always will be very simple, even though it has grown into a complex system.

Our worklihood, also a cascade, surely counts 50 million or thousand times more levers, so it has become very complex. Yet it still is very simple: One lever, and then another, and then another, and then the next, and the next, and the next… 😊

Here denkern plays out one of its strengths:
Denkern is a discipline of thought that captures the kernel of a system.
With this kernel available to you you can find and check the cascade pathways.

Denkern has, by its application to the handling of commonplace systems, found its principles, refined them and abstracted them, thus making them applicable to and useful forany type and every system.