Managing chaos or managing disorder?

The meeting was going well and the topic turned to change management. One of the two young women opposite me took her turn to ask me the next interview question: “I love managing chaos, I really thrive on it! Do you?”. I mirrored my questioner’s enthusiasm and was about to concur with similar zeal but, momentarily, I hesitated. The simple inquiry resulted in a swarm of circling thoughts. Did I ‘love’ and ‘thrive on’ managing chaos? Had I ever, in fact, managed chaos at all? What (and when?) did I even know of chaos? I was struck by how dissimilar her meaning of chaos must be to my own and it was at that moment (I later reflected) that my potential job offer started to slip away…

According to the OED, chaos is complete disorder and confusion. This what happened in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks at the Manchester Ariana Grande concert and at the Paris Bataclan. Residents in the Grenfell Tower fire and medics performing triage on bombed-out civilians in Mosul, Syria faced chaos. My personal vision of chaos comprises a vast hall containing hundreds, maybe thousands, of  people, all anxious, uncertain and speaking many different languages. Something bad has happened and no one is in charge. The image normally includes trials such as darkness, bare feet and broken glass, usually also children, wailing babies and assorted animals! Managing chaos, for me, means persuading and organising this group of people to undertake and complete a set of complicated activities. My instinct tells me that the task is, somehow, possible but decidedly problematic and uncompromisingly difficult. This is what chaos looks like to me and I am not at all certain it is an environment that I love or where I thrive.

I looked back at my smiling companion, realising that I had never, in my working life, experienced a situation that I could truly call chaotic. And I wondered, in that moment, what this self-proclaimed aficionado had in mind as she asserted her eagerness. How much chaos could there be in the modern office systems and practices of a twenty-first century company? I suspected that, as a Project Manager in a respected UK PLC her experience was probably pretty tame. Perhaps my own imagined, nightmarish, scene of chaos was more vivid than that of my would-be co-worker. Or, perhaps, my own threshold for disorder is simply higher than for many: I grew up in a large household where a miscellany of people and pets were continuously coming and going and a never-ending stream of concurrent games and activities was conducted at full tilt. Navigating the hurly-burly was my daily norm and, today still, I feel unfazed in the midst of commotion.

I felt completely certain that the modern business milieu of the company I hoped to join, and of most others, did not remotely meet any definition of chaos. Even my own daunting vision is very far from daily reality. Were not the catastrophic collapse of Carillion and last year’s NHS cyber-attacks examples of the exception that proves the rule? What, I pondered, did chaos look like to my would-be colleague? Was it the kick-off meeting, with staff from half-a-dozen different corporations, to plan the design of a new online financial trading system? Or the late discovery of an informal public holiday in the Philippines during the roll-out of new business practices across Asia-Pacific, which risked upsetting all existing plans and targets? Was her ‘chaos’ the discovery that the reporting of work as 'completed', by an Asian colleague during video-conferenced project meetings, was an exercise in cultural face-saving and incorrect? I had encountered all of these situations but none, I mused, remotely approached anything that I would call chaos. 

Needless to say, pedantic behaviour such as musing over word usage does not make for great interview technique. I could not distil or articulate my teeming thoughts quickly enough and, instead, my attempts to agree that I, too, loved chaos must have sounded horribly flat and blatantly false. Later on, I decided that a more accurate description of the state that my interviewer had referred to was, simply, uncertainty. Later still, however, this same person displayed absolutely no misunderstanding at all of uncertainty in her communication informing me that I had not been successful…

Managing uncertainty is unquestionably a common constituent of today’s project and change management. The increasing pace of change is ubiquitous while the uncertainty that it brings is often cumulative. So the task of every project manager is to manage both change and its attendant uncertainty with effectiveness but also with sensitivity. A good manager successfully harnesses, controls and, finally, lessens uncertainty. Reducing uncertainty in business reassures staff and improves their work setting; it can empower people to perform better and be more productive.

If I ever do encounter real chaos, I hope that the emergency professionals will be on hand swiftly to manage it and that I shall prove capable of acting bravely and usefully. In the meantime, I could agree with my interviewer, and with full conviction that, yes, I do love managing uncertainty. Indeed, it is a skill that I have honed over many years and brings a challenge that I truly relish. Managing uncertainty? Yes, I really thrive on it: Planning and managing change and acting to reduce uncertainty is exactly what I love!