A hawk will start by circling above a large flock of birds that are resting on the ground.
He will go in wide circular angles, descending lower and lower. Then, as he gets close enough, one of the birds will spot him and panic and fly off. The other birds will react, causing the entire flock to rush up toward the sky in desperation.
The hawk will not chase. He will wait. When the dust and feathers settle, he will look down and see several injured birds and have secured an easy meal. It is another day in the cruelty of nature, where one animal dies so that another may not starve.
Chaos is a fundamental energy of the universe, and you either use it to your advantage or against it. It might have seemed like the birds injuries were accidental, but it had a true cause and a culprit.
How it’s used in careers
In hospitals, nurses are often taught about chaos theory, which is the science of surprises. It states that within a seemingly random, chaotic set of circumstances, you’ll find underlying patterns and feedback loops.
For example, it’s a nurse’s job to read which patients are less stable than others, for their own safety and that of the patient. Some of the people who come through the hospital doors are highly volatile and sometimes violent.
My -ex worked with mental patients as a specialized nurse and told me some of the best strategies they used to deal with volatile patients.
For example, if someone was going nuts and shouting about irrational things and how people are conspiring against them, nurses would often just agree with them.
“Really? Why they’d do that to you?”
“I agree. That’s messed up.”
“We have to figure this out!”
Agreeing and taking their side helped bring their energy levels back down, almost instantly. It neutralized the aggressiveness.
The nurses exploit the situation to their advantage and to everyone’s benefit.
How this is useful to you
The most successful corporate managers are masters of accounting for surprises.
When I worked alongside them, I was initially surprised by how neurotic managers were about every little detail.
Then, as I put in more years in corporate, I began to see those random chance things happening. Those managers had seen stuff.
Netflix is an institutional ninja in managing chaos, and is one of the cutthroat companies to work for. Each year, managers must come before a committee and testify that if any of their direct reports want to quit, they will do everything they can to keep them on board.
If they can’t testify to that, the person should be fired. It’s an intense workplace by all measures. But it is anything but chaotic — to customers.
Netflix knows its business is very simple. We pay them. They show us cool shows. Anything that stands in between those two things, is a threat to their business model.
Now, because they have a streaming service, which works on complex systems where internet speeds fluctuate, and servers act chaotic, they must test their system to create redundancies. Netflix deploys what is called a “chaos monkey”. The chaos monkey is actually a person who is paid to go into the system and implement destructive code and break internal systems.
Like an airplane, Netflix aims to have no single point of failure and to implement redundancy for everything. When a chaos monkey goes in and discovers a deficiency, they find out who came up short and hold them accountable.
Governments do the same thing when they hire hackers and offer them an alternative to prison, “Would you rather work for us?”
By deliberately attacking your points of weakness and your exposure to risk, you position yourself to perform optimally. You reduce your surprises.
Netflix’s chaos monkey strategy is so effective that all of Silicon Valley now uses some version of it.
Driven, high-performing, intelligent people are ambushed less often in life. They hold themselves accountable and are the opposite of those who say life is always happening to them.
Some people are always downtrodden and say so-and-so did this to them, or some company did that. It’s constant blame and finger-pointing. They live in a vacuum of accountability.
Here’s how chaos theory has affected me:
Cause: I don’t sleep well because I stayed up late playing on my phone.
I go to work and am tired and don’t perform well.
I screw up and it further entrenches my mood.
My attitude worsens as the day goes on.
Trigger: I get home and snap at my girlfriend over something stupid and we get into a fight.
It all goes back to a central starting point. I should have gone to bed at a reasonable time. The Butterfly Effect is real and a component of Chaos theory.
What I try to do is ask myself, “Will the me of 12 hours from now be happy with this decision?”
“Will the me of tomorrow, or next year from now be happy with this commitment?”
We are inextricably linked to our future self.
So for example, I live in Tampa Florida and I went house shopping about 18 months ago. I made it a point to find a house with a bit of elevation. The state is very flat. I also wanted a home that was up to modern code to deal with storms. Why? Because Florida. Most forecasts stink unless the forecast comes the day of. It can be sunny with not a cloud in the sky, and be pouring rain an hour later. We’ve had many a beach day ruined. But we always know to pack an umbrella either way.
I wanted strong windows and a good roof so that I wouldn’t be on a ladder boarding windows. My home has underground electricity so we rarely lose power during storms — including during Hurricane Ian. I never lost power while many went without for 4 days.
Did I tell you much I hate forecasts? How do you even do anything with this?
You just plan for it.
The big idea is that catastrophizing can help. Not to the point where you end up in therapy. Just enough to keep you frosty. We have villainized stress beyond the point of reasonableness. Random things can go wrong, and will oblige to go wrong without proper planning.
We live currently as children of chaos, spawned into a system that has churned out universes in the violent galactic explosions, and also caused our email to stop working.