Managing chaos
Published in Books and Articles, Personal Skills on October 16, 2010
Chaos is a key concept in our new world…
And resilience is a key skill to develop to thrive/survive in this acceleration of change.
Here are a few tools by Catherine Palin-Brinkworth, I really couldn’t have said it better!
ENJOY 
Managing Chaos!
By Catherine Palin-Brinkworth
Okay, we know that all things are impermanent. But didn’t they used to change more slowly? Today, change is not the issue. The word that arises everywhere is CHAOS.
A few years ago businesses were experiencing massive restructurings, re-engineerings, and redirection. Skills and tools were needed for response to various impacts, to help us create rather than react. But now we’re spinning faster, and the group change tools don’t always seem to work. Perhaps what’s needed is an actual chaos management strategy!
Whether it’s your workplace or your personal relationships; whether you run a large organisation, a small business, a tiny team or simply your own life – the tools you need now are for managing chaos.
1. Know the “I”
Start by considering a hurricane, or a cyclone … utter chaos, causing great devastation. Think of the centre. Calm, peaceful, quiet. The eye. Think of it as yourself. You may not be able to stop or even control the wind and the noise around you. But you can retain your own centre. Find your strength, your capabilities, your power and your value, and stand quietly in your own ability to respond to each situation with courage and wisdom. We all have it. We just forget it sometimes when the winds of change are howling around us.
2. Know What Matters
“The first rule of success, and the one that supersedes all others, is to have energy. It is important to know how to concentrate it and focus it on the important things, instead of frittering it away on trivia.” (Michael Korda)
The most powerful thing you can do at any moment is re-focus. What do you want to achieve? Why is this important?
3. Nurture your network
No man is an island, nor a woman either. We operate best when interdependent. Not leaning, but supported. It may be time to re-value family, to re-assess social contacts, to re-energise team consciousness in the workplace. One of the keys to managing chaos is the ability to tap into support facilities. Productivity almost invariably increases when we delegate, leverage and pull together.
4. Courage to tell the truth
This may not be so for you, but for many people an enormous amount of time and energy is wasted in developing and maintaining the mask. There’s no time any more to do that – have you noticed? It’s time for ‘empowerment’ (the CPB word for claiming your own power, rather than grabbing it from others).
5. Learn to live with less
This is a strange concept for many of us in business who have spent much of our working lives running after ‘more’. When life moves fast, the less baggage we have to carry the better. Travelling light – in many ways – becomes more effective.
We’re discovering that a simpler life can be a lot less stressful. Not to decry wealth and its pleasures – just to eliminate the desperate struggle for it!
6. Rejoice regularly
A behavioural researcher visited a kindergarten. “How many of you can sing,” he asked? All hands went up. “How many of you can paint?” Again all hands were proudly thrust in the air. “And, how many can dance?” “Me, me, me,” was the answer. The researcher asked the same questions in a university lecture hall. “How many of you can sing?” Two hands. “How many of you can paint?” Not one. “And how many can dance?” Fingers were pointed at others, with comments and laughter, but not one claimed the ability. What happened? Why did we forget, or decide our own self-expression was not good enough? It’s just about a joyful release of stress hormones – good for the mind, the soul and the body.
7. Choose care over fear
I first learned it from Marianne Williamson, who wrote the beautiful words Nelson Mandela used in his inaugural address. There are only two fundamental emotions – love and fear. Anything that isn’t one is the other. Until recently, we didn’t talk about this in the corporate arena. Now we know, tough love builds good teams, and chaos is exacerbated by fear. This is not about being soft and gooey – you know that. It’s about finding a way to address issues head on with an intelligent mix of courage commitment and compassion.
Chaos is inevitable. In the sense that perturbation is evolutionary, it’s also desirable. But managing it is essential. It’s no use for any of us to hope that someone else will do it. Do you have your own personal strategies in place?
About the author: Catherine Palin-Brinkworth is an international presenter, consultant and author on business and personal success strategies. She holds a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and is a Certified NLP Practitioner. www.catherinepalinbrinkworth.com
see http://www.positivepath.net/ideas.asp for lots of ideas to aid productivity, success and happiness
Hey Elise!
These remind me one of my courses that i took, about innovation. There is one big question about innovation in that course(i m sure there are many, but that was concerning this one:): What is the best condition for being innovative in organizational level? At the end of whole year, i may say that the answer was ‘chaos’! Because, when everything is ‘perfect’, there is no place for improvement and when everything is ‘certain’, there is no place for taking your time to think about new ways. Though, another lesson to be learned was being innovative is not the same thing with being lost!
Cheers!!
Hey didem !
Thanks for sharing that experience and interesting insight into chaos and its positive side
‘CHAOS is the best condition for being innovative at an organizational level’
What type of skills does an entrepreneur of/in chaos need I wonder?
Cheers!!
Very interesting…..
It’s chaos time and it’s time for people that are able to manage it. I see a relationship between two positions, entrepreneur and project manager, they should develop common skills , in my oppinion. Your business is a big, long-term project.
You need not only capabilities and abilities to start it..this is not your goal. You want to run a sustainanle business and in order to make it sustainable you should be able to manage it during choas time. This mean,to have a strong risk management, an accurate time management, efficiency in allocating and using all kind of resources you have. You have to know how to use and to correlate everything you have and you can imply in your entrpeneurial activity. To be the right man at the right place at the right time. You must understand the situation you have to face..then you should envision the situation after you find and apply the best solution and step by step, in a very detailed approach you begin to manage the chaos.
The advice expressed by Ms Palin-Brinkworth is very generic. I can’t directly contradict what was written (well, NLP), however the practical application of these recommendations remains problematic. They are guidelines, perhaps even useful, to manage chaos, which – no doubt – is prevailing. Although I prefer to manage IN chaos. Slight difference, but crucial to me. It’s not very wise to “embrace the universe”, but you can still manage a tiny part of it.
This text is great!
How do we “learn to live with less”?
I completely agree that this is what we need to do, but this concept is pretty much working against everything we have ever learned. All focus has been on growth so far – both business and career wise. -If you don’t grow, you are not a success! I look forward to discussing this with you in Brussels.
Learn to live with less!
I completely agree with this idea.
When we arrive to Brussels, let’s see who has the least of things?
The practical output of the theory.
Change seems unprecedented and its catching up faster than we think. In reality, the more we think that it is beyond our control, but our vulnerability has it that it is taking a toll on us that stress becomes a day-to-day reality.
What stands out is the concept of rejoice regularly. True enough, after we deal with a chaos, we start again with a new one without having given ourselves a chance to celebrate. That’s how change of time has been happening that even celebrating, as part of our being human, is being forgotten!