Embracing the Chaos
"Everything was going to plan, then we added people to the mix" - anon
Murphy's law: if anything could go wrong, it probably will
vs.
Citizen Agency's law: if anything could go wrong, it probably will, but it will be something you never thought of...so stop worrying about it and embrace the chaos.
vs.
Citizen Agency's law: if anything could go wrong, it probably will, but it will be something you never thought of...so stop worrying about it and embrace the chaos.
Chris and I are reading an amazing new book by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstram, The Starfish and the Spider, which discusses what we think is the future of business: leaderless, decentralized organizations. We've seen, first hand, how significant the difference is between Starfish and Spider organizations, when we compare conferences (and unconferences) to the movement of BarCamp.
There is noone in control when it comes to BarCamp. It is just an idea in the wild. It changes and morphs with every location it takes place...follows the desires and whims of the organizers and participants. Like the Apaches that are mentioned in the book, even these groups are temporary, decentralized and spontaneous. There is no set schedule or hard and fast rules. People walk in and there is a blank slate. The event emerges from there.
In the past year + a couple of months, BarCamp has spread to almost all of the continents and taken place over 70x in over 50 locations. The only camps organized by the original founders have been the local Bay area ones plus the first Amsterdam camp.
But, even though BarCamp has been something instantly recognized around the world by thousands, it is still a very difficult concept to handle by many. As Ori discusses in the book: decentralized organizations have been around and prospered for thousands of years, yet, when the idea is presented to a group of business professionals, it is nearly impossible to grasp the idea of a leaderless organization.
So why chaos? What will embracing chaos do for you?
- Simple. It will prepare you for anything.
Imagine trying to prepare for every single outcome possible. It would drive you batty. Waste your time. And you would probably miss the one thing that eventually goes wrong. One of my best friends does contingency planning. She is really, really good at what she does. She takes her clients through various disaster scenarios to prepare them. But she would probably tell you that the most airtight contingency plan couldn't possibly cover every angle. On their homepage, it says: "You can't predict...you can prepare."
I'm not 100% sure of how Raido Response prepares you, but I'm pretty certain part of it is to help their clients embrace chaos and act quickly. - It will prevent you from making assumptions. (Assume = ass out of u and me)
And open mind is a mind that is prepared for learning and discovering. - It will reduce your stress levels.
I watch so many people using up so much energy on worrying about what could go wrong. I wonder what would happen in a REAL crisis? - It will open new doors.
When you try to control the situation too much, you limit possibilities. FOO Camp rocks, but look what happened when BarCamp mirrored the format and opened it up? A whole new beautiful event emerged.
We watch people start to trust their communities all of the time (actually, we prescribe it) to amazing results. I've always believed that if you trust people, they will more than likely impress you rather than let you down. - It will allow you to fail gracefully.
And, dammit, you SHOULD fail. Fail early and fail often. If you don't take risks and you don't fail, you will never learn much. Scott Berkun talked about this in his myths of innovation talk at FOO this year. Businessweek had a cover story on it this summer. Harvard has a whole department of study on it. The Colonel tried to sell his recipe something like 14,000 times before KFC was born. The Post-It pad was a result of a massively failed new glue.
Scientists know that every failure is one step closer to finding the answer. I always ask myself when I'm worrying, "What is the worst thing that could happen?" Answer: this doesn't work out. So? - It will allow you to be utterly agile.
If failure isn't an option and you invest so much time into making something air tight, it will be that much harder to realize that you need to change and/or let go of a project or situation. Imagine how liberating the feeling of agility can be when you hit a wall.
I challenge every one of you to go out, do something uncharacteristically chaos-embracing, then blog about how it made you feel and what happened as a result of it. It can be as simple as going to a concert by yourself and striking up a conversation with the people next to you, or as involved as throwing your own BarCamp.
7 Comments:
Great post Tara. We just had the first Barcamp in Ireland on Sep 30th and so much of what you said rings true.
We had over a month to arrange it and a lot of the time we'd ask ourselves if there was something we were forgetting or something more we should be doing. Should we be planning the day more? Should we invite speakers? Should we pick some topics in advance? Should we write an AJAX slot booking system ;-) The answer in all cases was no.
We'd see emails and blog posts talking about how we should organise the day etc. But when it came down to it, all we arranged was location, sponsors, food, wifi, buzz and opportunity. I think the most important thing we did was to constantly talk about the participatory nature of the day so that everyone was prepared and in the right mind-set.
On the day, the attendees embraced the idea entirely and the event pretty much self-organised. There was very little to do other than kick it off properly, make sure projectors worked and lay out the food and wine.
Of the down-sides, some thought that too much of the important chats happened in the hallways but I think the is a plus. We should have had hard cut-offs on duration but we only ran about 30 minutes over on the day and I think we had one round table which fell off the end of the day.
People are still surprised how well it went and how some of the most successful sessions were the off the cuff ones with no slideware. The arguments over where the next one will be held have already begun.
We owe all the organisers of the first Barcamp a huge debt of gratitude.
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What an inspiring post to wake up to this morning.
I've never been to a barcamp but when I get the chance I will.
I'm embracing chaos this week with the podcast jam--got up feeling completely electrified by it. Thanks for your support, Tara.
Thanks Tara as always something to think about. I'm reminded of Thomas Edison, when he was trying to find the material make the electric lightbulb filament he had made svereal hundred experiments and his assitant suggested that they give up. Edison's response was "We now know 200 things that don'te lets get on with finding the one that does." This is the way to treat failure learn from it.
Not to be all touchy-feely-do-goody, but kids self-organize all the time. So do friends when they're going out for the night, or when people meet at the park to play basketball or soccer.
Self-organizing happens all the time, even by business folks themselves - they just haven't seen a way to apply those models at work. And given how entrenched hierarchy and roles can be in the workplace, it's no surprise that unconferences and the like meet with much resistence. It takes a leader to show that that kind of change is possible.
-Scott
To second Scott's point:
Yes, in regards to playing pick-up games (I'm just getting back from a chaotic pick-up game where rules, language of choice, teams, time of play, etc, were all decided on the spot.
Before Scott's point I was only going to mention that chaos, organization, learning, and creation is something that academics have been understanding and explaining for years and years before the first barcamp. Homeschooling (or unschooling) is an example of this too.
We may owe more to Claude Levi-Strausse, Jose Cedillos, Wendell Berry, and Stephen Hawking than to the barcamp folks. I do.
Tara - Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers, is perhaps the book you were trying to remember. A great book, and the last self-help book I ever read.
Your post rings true to me. I was an improvisor for a number of years, and I've always felt that nothing could have prepared me better for dealing with utter chaos. Through improvisation, I learned to build trust with my fellow players, to extend trust to the audience, and to trust that even when I think the well has run dry, there is always more creativity inside me that I can apply to a given situation.
The first thing one needs to learn in order to be a successful improvisor is to let go of your ideas about the way things "should go." When you try to control a scene, when you refuse to release your preconceptions about how your fellow players "should" respond, or the lines they "should" say, the scene will almost always fail. But when you're open to surprises, when you're willing to be affected by others, you're rewarded with the most delightful successes.
Anyone looking to learn how to embrace chaos would do well to study the rules and techniques of improvisation.
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