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“What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized yet.”
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Chuck Palahniuk
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“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”
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Henry Miller
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So. Businesses absolutely freak out over the whole idea of chaos & confusion.
They see it as a terminal virus for which they spend gobs of money trying to inoculate the organization against and invest gobs of time trying to tamp down any outbreaks within an organization.
Well. Let me suggest that, on occasion, a little chaos and confusion outbreak is good for an organization.
Yup. I just said that.
I wrote fairly recently that great organizations tend to linger on the edge of chaos … or ‘bedlam’ as I called it.
I believe the part I left out is the idea that in a great organization, well, what appears to be chaos is not really chaos, and what appears to be confusion, is not really confusion. To be clear … it can have the same feel, the same smell, the same look … but it is not really chaos or confusion.
Well.
Then what the hell is it? In a great organization it is simply a pattern, or an order, we just don’t recognize … yet. And it is quite possible we will never see the pattern or create the order as ‘learning’ from the confusion. Instead, we may only see the outcome of the seeming chaos and confusion … and that outcome is most often a new idea or a new thought or a new invention.
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“Invention … does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
Mary Shelley
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New shit always confuses and scares, the crap out of an organization.
Most organizations seek consistency & order & patterns of behavior that they can manage and guide toward the holy grail of business – efficiency.
Shit.
I hate to break the news to everyone, but efficiency is not the holy grail of business.
The holy grail is ideas, inventions and thoughts.
Efficiency tends to grind those three things down to dust. Chaos and confusion tend to create the friction necessary to spark those three things to fire.
Maybe that’s it. Great organizations burn. We confuse the flames as chaos and confusion and only see the organization going down in flames. Instead, maybe we should see some chaos & confusion as to the phoenix. What I do know for sure is that more often than not … chaos and confusion in business are not really chaos & confusion.
Most times it is simply something happening in which we have yet to recognize the pattern … the NEW pattern the organization is adopting.
I am also pretty sure about this.
Inventions, ideas and innovations, the good ones … the ones that are dynamic beyond their own purpose, are more likely to come from chaos than from ‘efficient orderliness.’
That said.
Maybe the worst thing a business can do is try to tame the chaos within. It’s like asking an organization to not feel. Is there anything worse than not feeling?
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This post previously published on Enlightened Conflict and is republished with the permission of the author.
Photo courtesy Pixabay.