Are We Really Experiencing “Chaos” Right Now?

I mentioned to a CEO recently that I felt like the level of complexity in our world was on the rise, which might explain why some of our “standard” approaches to things were no longer working (similar to the point I made in this post back in June). Her response:

It’s not complexity any more—it’s chaos.

That made some intuitive sense to me. When I look at the world these days, it certainly feels chaotic and “unprecedented,” as we used to say in the pandemic. But as I thought more about it, I ended up falling down a bit of a rabbit hole to parse out exactly what differentiates chaos and complexity, and I ended up at the “Cynefin” framework, explained clearly in this 2007 HBR article by David Snowden and Mary Boone.

Rooted in complexity science, the model identifies four different states that can describe any particular context: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. It sounds like a continuum, where any of the states becomes “too much” and you move to the next state, but it’s not that, well, simple. The four states are actually differentiated based on how (and whether) we understand the core workings of cause and effect within that context.

Simple and complicated can be examined together, because they both assume that their contexts live in an “ordered” world, i.e., you can see the direct connection between cause and effect. In a simple context, pretty much anyone can see it, but in complicated one, you need deeper expertise to understand all the cause-effect relationships. We can all see why pedaling the front wheel of a tricycle will make it go forward, and if it broke, most of us have a decent shot at fixing it, but I, for one, cannot explain in any detail why pressing the gas pedal in a car results in forward motion, and if it breaks down, the best I can do is a good “dad pose”—standing with my hands on my hips, looking down at the broken engine, and scowling (and then calling AAA).

Complex and chaotic are fundamentally different because their worlds are “unordered,” i.e., cause and effect cannot be linearly mapped, because the variables morph and change over time. A car engine is complicated, but traffic is complex. Yes, you can determine patterns in complex systems like traffic or weather and make some very loose predictions, but they don’t happen exactly the same way every time. The patterns emerge, and cause/effect cannot be determined ahead of time. You have to sense it and react to it iteratively based on changing conditions.

To put this in an organizational context, treating a complex context like a complicated one gets you in trouble. Marketing strategy and tactics (complex) are not like managing a logistics supply chain (complicated), so you have to do more testing and responding based on what you’ve learned, rather than laying out a three-year Gantt chart, which can work mostly well for the logistics folks.

In fact, Snowden and Boone’s three-word sequence for complex contexts is probe-sense-respond. You test some things, learn from the results you get, and then determine a course of action, at which point you run that same sequence again (over and over). In the last few decades, complexity has become the norm for leaders, which is precisely why we’ve been evolving leadership and management away from the command-and-control approach of traditional management, which was designed for a more complicated world. When I and others write about the “future of work,” we are mostly writing about strategies for handling complex contexts.

Which brings us to the opening question—are we now in chaos? I think the answer is yes, but not all the time. While both chaos and complexity operate in an “unordered” world, complexity can be a sustainable state, but chaos cannot. Chaos emerges when constraints inside the system (that are typically out of your control) break down, and cause and effect are impossible to determine, because you can’t even discern patterns. Your job in chaos is to implement some constraints to bring stability back, so you can go back to your work of probe, sense, and respond that works in complexity. At that point, as long as things aren’t devolving into chaos again, you can do your complexity work indefinitely.

Twenty years ago, Snowden and Boone declared that chaotic contexts were “mercifully rare,” and that is what is different about today: they are mercilessly common.

Grant funding disappears overnight, regulations get rewritten (or unwritten), and we’re no longer questioning the role of different departments in decision making—we’re questioning the role of humans. The work in chaos is different. Instead of PROBE-sense-respond, it’s ACT-sense-respond. You take action to create constraints that stabilize the situation; there’s no time to probe.

That’s significant, because frankly, we are pretty early on our learning curve for complex contexts, and now we’re being asked to deal with chaotic ones. Tomorrow I’m announcing a new research project that connects directly to these issues, because the pressure is increasing and we all will need to be upping our game in the coming years. More to come.

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