How to Slay the Chaos Dragon

In my first job out of college, I had a frenetic boss whom we’ll call Don. Don was all over the place in a quite literal sense: running from desk to desk across the office, talking to people here and there, dashing in and out for cigarettes all day. At the end of 1998, Don had been late for meetings so often that he announced an initiative called “On Time in ’99!” to kick off in the new year.

He didn’t get the chance to implement it. The company I worked for hired an organizational consultant, who, legend has it, identified Don and the cloud of chaos around him as the root cause of virtually all of the various process failures we were experiencing.

Don was fired.

As an organizational consultant myself today, I’m fascinated by this set of events. I feel bad for Don: It seems unlikely that all of the chaos traced back to him. And indeed, things remained pretty chaotic after he departed.

The goal resonates, though: Minimizing chaos is, in my professional experience, 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.

1. 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. Imagine a football team with multiple huddles: How would you ever pull off a well-run play?

The sanest organizations I’ve done consulting work with, and the healthiest leadership teams I’ve been a part of myself, 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.

This may sound straightforward, but once you get to several-hundred-person chunks of organizations, the permutations of connections between teams pile up quickly. So 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.

Often, organizations attempt an emergency version of this as a crisis erupts, only to discover that the leaders they’re hurriedly pulling together have been working in such separate lanes that there’s an incredible amount of context that has to be shared and trust that has to be built before they can mobilize their teams jointly. As the leaders play catch-up, chaos mounts. Leaders who are already in a live conversation with one another have a tremendous edge in this scenario.

2. Create and protect space in meetings for impromptu dialogue.

In a prior role, pre-entrepreneurship, I was hired with the explicit mandate of soothing the waters of a chaotic team. I came in and immediately looked for levers I could hit to make things even a bit more predictable.

A clue came to me in the strangest place: I was asked to introduce myself during a recurring town hall meeting and was given such a short time slot in such a packed agenda that my remarks culminated with my effectively getting played off the stage like a verbose Oscar winner. To try to recover from the bizarre experience of getting Zoom-silenced by the group, I did a bit of an emotional audit. What I was feeling was pretty simple: I had things I needed to say, and I had not gotten the full chance to say them.

This was a lousy feeling — but indicative of a structural problem. The group had a complex array of meetings, matrixed by employees’ levels within the organization, and the meeting agendas were completely, almost compulsively, full. If a matter came up that needed to be discussed, additional meetings had to be frantically parachuted into already-packed calendars. This meant that even mildly chaotic events (say, a client being unhappy with a deliverable, which is a thing that happens frequently in consulting) turned into full crises quickly as discussions fragmented across tiny chunks of time within the subgroups that were available.

So I took some advice I frequently give clients and audiences: I killed a bunch of standing meetings. And I loosened the agendas for the gatherings that did remain, creating 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.

Did this step banish all chaos? No, of course not. Did our ability to handle chaos improve? Yes, it did. 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. Chaos was still there, but our resilience had increased thanks to having space for discussion.

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.

3. Explicitly guard against the bad behavior that chaos can cover.

I discovered something disturbing when doing research for my forthcoming book, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World. Academic research explicitly links chaotic environments with every bad workplace behavior except for sexual harassment: Examples include bullying by supervisors, conflict between employees and customers, and infighting by colleagues. To fans of postapocalyptic science fiction like me, this tracks: After the asteroid hits Earth, or the zombies come out, many people seem to start acting like real jerks.

This raises a fascinating question: 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.

SHRM offers a definition of bullying that can be helpful in addressing any category of bad behavior: “Workplace bullying refers to repeated, unreasonable actions of individuals (or a group) directed toward an employee (or a group of employees), which are intended to intimidate, degrade, humiliate, or undermine; or which create a risk to the health or safety of the employee(s).”

This definition gives leaders some good questions to ask themselves when they witness heated moments in chaotic times. “Repeated” alone is a good test. Anyone can have a lousy day and spout off once; when the behavior happens again and again as the team wrestles with a crisis, it’s time to step in. “Unreasonable” also categorizes actions in a helpful way. Are people asking for, or criticizing others for not providing, things that can reasonably be provided or implemented? Or has panic tipped them over into overreaction? (“I expect you to be at your desk all night until this is finished!”)

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.

4. 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 say? But I loathe chaos.”

Me too, honestly. But that’s why I force myself to remember a few things:

Chaos accelerates personal development. It’s incredibly frustrating to deal with a million things happening at once in unpredictable ways. But some of that frustration is the feeling of your brain being challenged — and challenge equals growth. Many executives I’ve worked with have cited chaotic times as the crucible for the growth of some of their strongest skills. The chaos didn’t feel good at the time, but they were learning at exponential speed.

Chaos can shake up the corporate chessboard in helpful ways. One C-suite executive (and certified chaos hater) sheepishly admitted to me the other day that “every decent opportunity I’ve gotten has been because things were in disarray.” Again, we may not love what Ashley Goodall so memorably called “life in the blender,” but the most chaotic events do sometimes tee up intriguing opportunities (or even new roles). Especially in an era where people increasingly value horizontal or diagonal growth — building lateral skills through different kinds of exposure, not just marching into more senior roles in a linear fashion — there’s definitely an upside to the corporate ladder getting a good shake now and then.

Chaos can give us all the opportunity for a cleansing laugh. Think about some of your most memorable moments with the teams you’ve worked with. I bet at least one or two are downright silly. When things get chaotic and people choose to see comedy and not tragedy, we can all have some distinctly human fun together. The randomness of the universe is not just frustrating and annoying and exhausting. It can be goofy, too.

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.