The moment I remember most clearly happened during a workshop with a Google team last month. Twenty minutes into our session, the project lead looked up from the whiteboard and said, "Wait, there's actually nothing here that's truly chaotic."
This wasn't the breakthrough I'd expected when they'd come to me for help with what they described as "complete chaos" in their organisation. But it's become a pattern I'm seeing everywhere, where teams are convinced they're drowning in chaos when they're actually just overwhelmed and confused.
The Chaos Trap
Right now, particularly in the US, I'm hearing the same refrain from leaders across industries: "Everything is chaotic. It's all crazy. We can't cope." They're using the Cynefin framework's Chaotic domain to describe their situation, but I think they've got it wrong.
True chaos has no discernible patterns. It's unpredictable, with no clear cause and effect. But when I sit down with these teams and we start mapping out their challenges, something interesting emerges. There are patterns. There are connections. There's actually quite a lot they can get a grip on, they're just not separating it out properly.
What they're experiencing isn't chaos at all. It's confusion.
The Difference That Changes Everything
Confusion feels overwhelming because you're trying to process everything at once. It's like standing in a crowded room where everyone's talking simultaneously - the noise is deafening, but each conversation has structure and meaning if you can focus on it individually.
Chaos, on the other hand, would be if those conversations kept changing languages mid-sentence, with speakers randomly swapping topics and the room itself constantly rearranging.
The distinction matters because the response is entirely different. In chaos, you act first and sense later, you make rapid interventions to create stability. In confusion, you need to slow down, categorise, and create clarity before you act.
The 20-Minute Solution
Here's the process I've been using with teams who think they're in chaos:
Step 1: Brain Dump Everything - Get everything that feels chaotic onto a central space - a whiteboard, digital board, whatever works. Don't organise yet, just capture.
Step 2: Sort Into Domains - Now comes the crucial part. Take each item and ask: "Is this something we understand well and have clear processes for?" (Obvious domain). "Do we know what good looks like but need to analyse the situation?" (Complicated). "Are we in new territory where we need to experiment?" (Complex). "Is this genuinely unpredictable with no patterns?" (Chaos).
Step 3: Move Everything Out of the Centre - The magic happens when teams realise that almost nothing belongs in the chaotic domain. Most issues move to complicated or complex, domains where there are established approaches for making progress.
In that Google workshop, within 20 minutes the team had moved everything out of chaos. Suddenly, instead of feeling overwhelmed by an impossible situation, they had a clear view of what needed analytical thinking, what required experimentation, and what they could solve with existing knowledge.
It's About Your Nervous System, Not Your Strategy
There's something deeper happening here that goes beyond frameworks and processes. When teams label their situation as chaotic, it often reflects their nervous system response rather than the actual nature of their challenges.
I recently spoke with someone who used to work in the Biden White House, discussing the aid and development sector. She described how the recent dismantling of entire departments created this feeling of chaos across the sector. But as we talked, it became clear that this was more about the emotional and psychological impact( the feeling of groundlessness) than about the work itself becoming unpredictable.
When we're in this heightened state, everything feels chaotic because our nervous system is primed for crisis. The antidote isn't a better strategy; it's creating enough calm to see the patterns that are actually there.
The Path Forward
If your team is struggling with what feels like chaos, try this:
Resist the Chaos Label: Before accepting that you're in chaos, test it. Can you identify any patterns? Any cause-and-effect relationships? Any elements you do understand?
Separate and Categorise: Use the Cynefin framework properly. Most of what feels chaotic is actually complicated (needs analysis) or complex (needs experimentation). Choose to start from an assumption that you’re confused (don’t know) before you jump in.
Address the Nervous System: Acknowledge that feeling overwhelmed is normal when dealing with multiple complex challenges. Create space for people to breathe and think rather than just react.
Focus on the Next Step: You don't need to solve everything at once. Once you've categorised your challenges, pick one item from the complicated domain (something you can analyse and solve) and start there. Or if stress is really high, pick an obvious domain next action that just needs doing - create momentum.
Finding Your Footing
The teams I work with often describe this process as finding their footing again. Not because their challenges have disappeared, but because they've moved from feeling helplessly reactive to feeling capable of thoughtful response.
Your situation probably isn't as chaotic as it feels. There's likely more that you can understand, influence, and improve than you realise. The question isn't whether you can handle chaos - it's whether you can create enough clarity to see what you're actually dealing with.
Because once you can see the patterns, you can find the path forward.
Are You Feeling Overwhelmed By What Seems Like Chaos?
Most leaders I work with describe the same moment - when they realise their biggest challenge isn't the complexity itself, but that they've been looking at it wrong. Once you can see the patterns that were always there (but hidden beneath the overwhelm), the path forward becomes surprisingly clear.
The teams that get unstuck fastest aren't the ones with the best strategies - they're the ones who learn to recognise what they're actually dealing with. And here's what I've noticed: that recognition usually happens in the first conversation, not the tenth.
If you're curious about what patterns might be hiding in plain sight in your organisation, let's have that conversation. Sometimes the most valuable insights emerge when someone with fresh eyes takes a look at what feels chaotic to you.
Down Your Way - New York, Toronto, Addis Ababa, Mexico City
