When Learning is the Order of the Day… Try a Little Chaos

Discover How Embracing Uncertainty Can Transform Your Organization into a Learning Machine

Next time you’re in a room with a few dozen or a few hundred people, imagine that it’s your job to organize them in a long line according to height – from tallest to shortest – as quickly as possible. Simple, right? Even as a single person managing a large crowd, you’d likely be able to do the job quickly and efficiently without having to give too much thought as to how.

Now, imagine a different challenge. This time, you’re tasked with organizing everyone in the room into groups based on, say, the university they attended or the state where they were born. Suddenly, the task becomes much more difficult. You might not know the best strategy for doing this one efficiently, and you surely don’t know where everyone in the room went to university. Heck, you might not even know all of the states.  

By comparison with the first task, the second clearly calls for a different approach. 

Ask just about any senior leader in just about any fast moving industry to identify the key to organizational adaptability, and they’ll tell you it has something to do with the ability to repeatedly learn new things or solve new problems. And that’s just about as far as the consensus goes. Ask a follow-up question about how you design an organization to foster that ability, and well, things are liable to get messy.

Perhaps appropriately, there’s no single, one-size-fits-all circumstances model for a highly capable learning organization. But make no mistake: There are compelling examples worth studying and design principles well worth stealing. One of our favorite models at be Radical is the chaordic organization – a design that leverages controlled chaos to thrive in a highly interconnected and interdependent world where it’s more important to know the direction for tomorrow than it is to nail the strategy today.

Pascal likes to quote Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on the upside of managed chaos: 

“Most companies overoptimize for efficiency… The nonintuitive thing is that it is better to be managing chaotically if it’s productive and fertile. Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.”

The idea of a chaordic organization (“chaord” itself being a portmanteau combining elements of chaos and order) comes to us from the late Dee Hock, who pioneered the model in his innovative structure for what became the VISA payment system. Hock’s idea was to design an organization that would leverage the tension between chaos and order, competition and collaboration to solve a problem (creating a robust, reliable, globally supported credit card system) that no single organization or leader had been able to crack. His success was revolutionary, but the basic principles of chaordic org design are relatively simple.

• Agree on purpose and core principles. This is absolutely first and foremost: Hock spent more than a year on this step with partners in what became the VISA system.

• Distribute power and decision-making. This promotes information sharing, accelerates learning, and empowers potential solvers closest to the problem(s).

• Establish nodal authority – and ways to route around intermediaries as appropriate. This further promotes self-organization (within the framework of core principles) and flexibility.

Returning to our crowd-organizing game from the top of the essay, consider how much more effective a chaordic approach to the second task would likely be than a top-down approach that depends on a single leader (i.e., you) to come up with and execute the right strategy. And now imagine a third and then a fourth challenge, each more complex that the last one.

How is your organization or team structured, and is that structure optimized for near-term efficiency (a.k.a., doing what we know now really, really well) or longer-term learning (a.k.a., figuring out how to do new and different things)? If it’s the former, consider letting in a little productive, fertile chaos. 

Or as it’s been so eloquently put elsewhere, “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos – repeatedly.”

@Jeffrey