Most people run from chaos. That’s a problem.
There’s a soft skill nobody talks about in transformation work: the ability to sit in disorder without panicking. It’s terrifying. It feels reckless. But it’s one of the fastest ways to cut through years of incremental bullshit.
Take the Twitter saga—whatever you think of Elon, there’s a method worth examining. He laid off half the workforce in one swing. Brutal? Absolutely. Chaotic? By design.
But here’s what happened: the system broke in specific places. Fast. He learned in weeks what would’ve taken consultants eighteen months and millions in discovery fees to figure out. Which 100 roles actually mattered. Which systems were load-bearing. Which processes were theater.
You can hate the approach. But you can’t ignore the speed.
Disorder Uncovers What Matters
Most organizations study problems until the market moves. Controlled chaos cuts through years of planning by spiking the system and watching what actually breaks.
Chaos as a diagnostic tool.
Most organizations incrementalize themselves to death. They pilot programs. They form committees. They study the problem until the market moves and the problem changes.
Controlled chaos does something different—it creates variance fast. You spike the system, watch what breaks, and identify the vital few variables that actually move outcomes. The critical Xs that drive your most important Ys.
In transformation work, we do this deliberately. We dump everything into one space—a war room, a virtual whiteboard, whatever. All the diagnostics, all the analyses, all the conflicting data. It looks like a disaster. Clients panic.
That’s the point.
Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.
We coach teams to work the chaos. Test hypotheses. Find connections nobody saw when everything was siloed. Build consensus around what success actually looks like—not what the strategic plan from 2019 says it should look like.
Slowly, patterns emerge. The puzzle assembles itself. A strategic path becomes visible that nobody could’ve planned from a conference room.
This is a form of productive suffering. Grinding through disorder hardens the outcomes. The strategy that survives chaos is antifragile—it gets stronger under pressure because it was forged under pressure.
When chaos doesn’t work.
If your business runs well and has solid foundations, don’t inject chaos. Incremental planning works fine when systems are healthy.
But if you’re dysfunctional? If you’re in rapid change and legacy processes are anchors? If every meeting ends with “let’s form a working group to explore this further”?
You don’t need more structure. You need controlled demolition.
The takeaway.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Chaos reveals truth faster than consensus ever will. The answers are already in your organization—they’re just buried under process, politics, and the fear of breaking things.
Sometimes you have to break things to find out what matters.
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