How to Slay the Chaos Dragon

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Minimizing chaos is one of the healthiest goals an organization can set. Sadly, in today’s environment, this can seem impossible to leaders. Most organizations deal with both a chaotic external world (featuring wild daily gyrations in everything from geopolitics to weather to technology) and a chaotic internal landscape (featuring the level of shifting priorities that comes with the scale and complexity of so many companies today). If 2026 feels especially chaotic, you’re not wrong.  All hope is not lost, though. Leaders can take steps to help people handle chaos before things go off the rails, or at least before things go off the rails entirely. Let’s take a look at four of them.

Constantly talk to the teams your team works with.  Poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” and no team is, either. You don’t have to be a big, messy matrix organization to operate in a teams-of-teams manner. Even relatively small companies feature incredible amounts of interdependency between groups.  This phenomenon causes chaos by generating competing priorities. It also exacerbates the chaos that comes in from the outside by multiplying and fragmenting the organization’s strategies to respond to any given event.  According to the author, the sanest organizations she has done consulting work with, and the healthiest leadership teams she has ever been a part of, all addressed this issue in the same fairly informal way: Leaders got to know who their teams were teaming with, and they stayed in contact with those teams’ leaders.  Leaders are challenged not to map every interaction for their team but to understand the “mosts”: most frequent, most strategic, and most charged team-to-team interactions.  Once leaders engage in a regular, everyday dialogue about the work their teams are doing together, chaos levels begin to modulate. Multiple leaders can work together to collectively shift people’s priorities to what the organization really needs. They can also minimize collisions between people doing the same or conflicting work.

Create and protect space in meetings for impromptu dialogue.  On average, we were able to address issues more quickly with more of the right people in the room — and we were able to lessen silent emotional burdens among the team by bringing issues up quickly and publicly — because we had already designated time to do so.  What if the things off-road?  You need to kill a bunch of standing meetings, loose the agendas for the gatherings that did remain, create space for whatever was happening at that moment, for silence so that people could think, or for — brace yourself — the meeting to end early if we didn’t need the full time slot.  Reserving space in meetings can feel uncomfortable when you first implement it. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, corporate environments hate blank space in meetings or on calendars. It may be tempting to delete that agenda bullet that says “AOB” (any other business). But resist the urge to pack every hour. When you need that extra five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes because something has come up, it will feel like absolute magic to have time to talk about what you actually need to talk about.

Explicitly guard against the bad behavior that chaos can cover.  Are we making the experience of chaos worse than it needs to be by simply tolerating unpleasant behavior in chaotic times? After all, in the workplace, we often normalize crummy conduct in these sorts of moments. Results are suddenly bad? Of course the CEO is yelling. An unexpected deliverable is due ASAP? Of course the team is clashing. Conditions on the ground are wild? Of course folks are bickering with customers. All of this, of course, makes the chaos worse and the underlying issues less surmountable, but many organizations have come to accept it as a normal way of working in tough moments.  We shouldn’t.  A certain amount of back-and-forth is healthy and actually an indicator of psychological safety. But in chaotic moments, leaders must be vigilant about recognizing when strong statements have become bullying, when push and pull about roles and responsibilities have become toxic infighting, and when boundary-setting with customers has become too fraught.  Once you’ve identified truly over-the-line behavior, name the problem — contextualized to the chaotic situation to remove excuses: “I know this supply chain shortage is taxing us all, but the way you spoke to Sally was degrading and unhelpful.” Make it explicit that chaos does not issue everyone a blank check to indulge their worst impulses.  While chaos and bad behavior unfortunately often travel together, that’s not a coupling that sane leaders need to accept.

It’s not all bad: Reap the upsides of chaos.  You may have read the heading above and done a bit of a double take. “The upsides – you don’t need to loathe chaos.”  Remember a few things:  Chaos accelerates personal development.  Chaos can shake up the corporate chessboard in helpful ways.  And chaos can give us all the opportunity for a cleansing laugh.

The reality of life at any organization is that you can’t fully shield your team from chaos, and per that last strategy, you shouldn’t, either. With the right team-to-team communication, the right space to have the right conversations, and the right protection from bad behavior, your team can grow, get new opportunities, and even chuckle together during chaos.  In Greek mythology, chaos is defined as simply the time before the world was formed. Under that framework, chaos itself is almost immaterial; it’s what comes after that matters. And leaders: That part is what you choose to make of it.

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