Chaos is a necessary stage.

That’s hard to accept for some of us.

But whatever happens during a significant personal or organizational change, there is or there will be chaos.

The question is what kind of chaos it is.

In my eyes, one type of chaos is the one created by your will to change things, your risk-taking, your sidestep or forward step, your impulse, your desire. You’ve left your comfort zone for a good reason, willingly. And now you must (re)discover, (re)build, allow emergence.

The other chaos would be the one you endure. A state of affairs, something that’s disintegrating. It’s chaos because what worked before no longer works.

These are two types of chaos, but they are quite different. One is a soup like the one at the beginning of time, a thousand things will emerge from it, the other is quicksand that suffocates you. But people don’t necessarily make the distinction and often welcome both in the same way.

In organizations, I encounter both types of chaos. The quicksand chaos tries to save appearances, to repair, to freeze, the emergent chaos seeks to build, to discover, reveal something. Their forces are opposite. They cancel each other out or weaken each other. We repair nothing or little, we build nothing or little. The wasted energy is too great.

We spend far too much energy on these opposing forces. In organizations, this waste is fatal. We don’t know which foot to dance on. Whether we repair, freeze, protect, or whether we create, discover, try, when the directions are contradictory we waste crazy amounts of energy for few results. You must choose your chaos. And send a strong signal.

And the signal indicates the direction.

And the direction indicates the signal.

I have long defended these transformations through emergence that feed on invitation, on adaptation. But I need to strengthen the signal more and more: we want to transform ourselves, which actually means, we accept and we want to evolve continuously in harmony with the world around us. This signal must be given by those who hold the levers, those who hold the helm, those in management, I’m talking about “top management,” those who have the power. Without a clear signal, too much energy is spent on contradictory dynamics. Too much energy spent on contradictory chaos.

I’ve been returning in recent months to the idea that the best signal is the “big bang.” By “big bang” I mean that we clearly indicate that we must change, and everywhere: we must evacuate the quicksand chaos, and embrace the chaos of emergence.

The “big bang” definitely does not mean: we go from state A to state B. Bam, all at once, in a big explosion. No, we don’t know what B will be. But we all want to leave A, we all want to go toward B. As I still believe, the path toward B (then C, then D, it’s a continuous evolution) will be emergent (hence the invitation, the adaptation). And the first step from A to B is accepting chaos. And the first manifestation of this positive chaos, the opening so to speak, is the clarification, the signal that A is definitively behind us. The “big bang” is this irrevocable signal. The three taps of the cane on the theater floor.

When this happens, all energies are directed in the right direction. Chaos appears as this soup so full of richness. Each difficulty has value.

Thus sometimes a “big bang” mode generates a salvific chaos upon which true emergence can feed rather than living in the chaos of an ill-adapted organization.