Embracing Chaos and Order

Anyone who is building a company is on a quest to organize things and bring order. If you sit through enough pitch sessions, you'll inevitably hear many say - "we are organizing the unorganized industry".

Startups are birthed many a times as a way of bringing order - and there by scale - to an industry.

The fundamental thesis is that order is good. Chaos is bad.

Organizations are built through order. And in some cases, through a cult like order, and that's where the term "culture" comes from. What is not cult-ure is automatically thrown out, or rejected from entering in the first place. The org hums to one beat and rhythm and that is usually from above.

Over the years, there are leadership styles that are evolving, and there is leadership from the front, but there is also leadership from behind - where leaders like Vineet Nayar talk about employees first and building a culture that prioritizes the workforce. There is also the orchestra style of leadership where the team gets the visibility, the leadership guides, but with their back to the audience, you only see the maestro's waving hands.

This idea of Chaos is fascinating. And the world of science fiction, and even mysticism sees it as a form of energy that drives it. So much so, that in some books you will see genders being assigned to it.

Chaos energy is seen as a feminine form and the energy of order is seen as a masculine one (whether the world agrees to such distinct categorization of gender and stereotypes is a discussion altogether).

I personally feel chaos gets a bad rap. Whenever you disrupt equilibrium, you create chaos. And if you are a startup, and a disruptor, chaos is bound to ensue. And it is usually in that chaos that new order is formed. The world wars where new world orders were created is a classical example for it.

It is in the chaos that new ideas are birthed. It is in the chaos that new value is created. It is in the chaos that you start imagining beyond the boundaries of "what is possible". And i guess in a sense that is feminine - in a very positive way. It is fundamentally the essence of life.

It is hard to reign chaos, but you also need to make room for it. If what you do is all orderly, you soon become an organization, but then you become a corporate - a soulless organization where troops march to the beat in perfect unison, but there are no colors. And no matter how much you try to add colors into that organization through acquisitions, fundamentally the cult-ure is that you integrate to survive - and any spark of chaos, dies in that process.

So if you want to build an organization that will last a 100 years or more, you also have to embrace chaos. Even for a startup, to be functional, you need be chaotic, but also have some order - else customers wouldnt get what they were promised. In an organization, you need order, but you also need chaos, or you have no hope for the future - and you are running on past fumes. Both (must) exist at the same time within the same entity, just that the balance and what dominates, differs.

Chaos is an ally. When you remove all order from a brainstorming process, you suddenly realize that you can fundamentally reimagine things. Who is that said, that this is how it should be done? Isn't the nature of startups to very much challenge that?

Perhaps this is the soul searching test for anyone who has grown beyond 200 people and still calls themselves a startup - how much room is there in your company for chaos. If you say its mostly order and less chaos - then you are more an organization than a startup. There's nothing wrong about it, but always good to know what we truly are.