Healthy chaos is the only management style guaranteed to take you successfully through the 21st century.
You may not be planning on being here that long, but you want to get into at least the start of it, don't you?
So forget Total Quality Management, Total Reengineering, Total Quality Control, Total Quality Assurance, Total Anything as a workable operating strategy from now on. Total has been wiped out, written off, ground zeroed, er - totalled.
Howzat ?
Well, the very first item on your Things To Do Today list should read: Change. This is not referring to the jingle-jangly pocket shrapnel which alters your Armani symmetry into Miyake designer droop.
Nor is it the change of bourse, Wall Street, Stock Ex, etc. (Definitely not the change of Ex-. In fact, the change in Stock Exchange is almost oxymoronic. Brokers and economists seem the most obvious examples of professions attempting to outlive their use-by date. Strategic planners are next. And yes, you may quote me).
The Thing To Do Today Change refers to your management operating style. "Whoa!" did I hear you say? "Nothing wrong with my management style; look how successful I am, look how successful my organisation is. Why should I change? Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
Okay. May I be amongst the first to offer condolences on the demise of a once-healthy bright-eyed and bushy-tailed organisation. Yours. It hasn't died yet, but it has a fatal disease called slow-change management.
If your managing style is not constantly and rapidly evolving, you are practicing the only Total management theory working today: Total Terminal Management. And those who care about you and your organisation sincerely hope you will fail and they send their best wishes for a speedy recovery. If it is not speedy, it will not be a recovery.
Chaos is the constant and often unknowable state of change on this planet. (Probably true for most planets, but you should stick to talking about what you know best - I know more about this one.)
Healthy chaos is having some control over that change. Not necessarily even much control, but at least some.
Unhealthy chaos is anarchy. No control. Out-of-control change. Randomness. Ad hockery. Anarchy is not sustainable for human or corporate life. Anarchy or unhealthy chaos moves inexorably towards entropy, catatonia, no-go, ideath.
Each of us has a choice. You can live in healthy or unhealthy chaos. Your decision. No cop-out excuses accepted. No denials, plea bargains, cries of diminished responsibility, or, I'll-do-it-next-year. No blaming the boss, the system, the secretary, your mother, your father, your priest, your guppy - you alone are responsible for how you are operating right now. And how you are operating right now determines your future. Scary thought ?
This is one of those strange situations in life where NOT choosing is actually a choice. If you are not actively living a healthy chaos, you are passively choosing to live in unhealthy chaos. Unhalthy chaos becomes healthy chaos as soon as you take some control over the changes occurring, and create the changes you want to happen.
You live/work predominantly one or the other - healthy or unhealthy, positive or negative, nurturing or destroying, developing or dying, future focussed or rear-visioning. Which one are you ?
Healthy chaos is a more a mindset than a list of operating practices. How to spot a healthy chaos mindset (well, if you want a healthy chaos mindset you want to be around others and not around unhealthy chaos mindsets) ? Look for these symptoms.
A healthy choas mindset :
- loves the iidea of change, of new, of difference, of untried, of Why Not?
- recognises inherent risks in the unknown (ie, is not stoopid!) but the challenge of pursuing excellence overcomes any fear of failure
- pursues excellence not perfection (perfection is impossible; ergo, perfectionists are failures)
- looks for the best way to work with the best in other people and other situations, knowing the achievable whole is greater than the sum of its individual aspirations (or: our output is more than your output plus my output added together)
- thinks cooperation not competition and knows that what helps a "competitor" (old thinking) helps your own enideavours; there is no limited market, finite client base, limited resource base, or limited anything except what the mindset perceives as such; cooperation is the only true win-win mindset
- trusts:
- itself to be honourable and right most of the time, and accepts that there will be occasional stuff-ups which will not diminish your self-worth;
- other people the same way until individually proven non-trustworthy;
- the universe to recognise fair play and honourableness, even if the universe's timetable is sometimes much slower than we would like
- honours the right for everyone else to be different, to want different, to seek different, and to work and play different - without judgement of right or wrong for anyone else
- lives kodachrome, not black & white
- thinks omni, not 35mm
- laughs more than sighs.
If you live healthy chaos, you will be able to add your own traits to this list, because you will have other thoughts, experiences, desires, joys and warm fuzzies.
And that is just the point about healthy chaos: we cannot completely know our world and the people in it, now or in the future. - change is occurring too fast.
But we can meet that world and her people with a set of values and iideals that allow us to bring out the very best in ourselves and each other.
We can look for what we like and look to create what we want to have and be. We can put our energies and talents toward making the kind of business world we love to be in.
Hopefully, you will recognise that the very best business world will continue to be healthy chaos. And you have learned to love the dynamism, flexibility, diversity, unlimitlessness, creativity, and sheer good fun of a world in healthy chaos.
Of course, by the year 2050, we will not label it "chaos" at all, for it will have become the status quo.
Now that is a scary thought : What comes after healthy chaos?.
Business Directions 3 April 1996
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