Actual Chaos Management in Practice - not the usual crap

This is a first draft, with no thought put into what this draft should contain, structured, or the point of it is. One thing is definite, presentation, posting and development of the idea must start from my side. Hopefully not click bait, which makes me wonder somewhat about this site.

I am a physic graduate, many years ago, during these years my favourite subjects were Quantum Mechanics and Electromagnetism. While at no point can I ever claim to understand either of these topics beyond the very basics, they contained some absolutely magical ideas.

Entropy and Chaos Theory in particular. If you google Chaos Theory and management you will no doubt find many examples. I'm not going to list any of them, most them I found summarised the tenants of chaos theory and how they might apply to management. Essentially of no use to anyone.

I propose there is something to this idea. That noise in a complex adaptive system, can be manipulated with intent to drive a certain outcome. This is currently done by physicians to great effect, so I propose the management team to be the central nervous system and the staff the peripheral nervous system.

A problem in the shoulder can be a problem with the shoulder, nothing more and nothing less. However, a problem in the shoulder can stem from a problem in the back, posture, or from systemic stress to the entire system. In management, we have plenty of tools that deal with the shoulder problem of the shoulder, none which all me to deal with failures that are a result of the entire system.

Noise can be considered exactly as it sounds. Noise in the office. Good noise, bad noise, will tell you a lot about the health of an office - including no noise. If you want to, loop in social media.
Through actions directed across the office and teams and in particular the management team you can manipulate noise. The resulting of manipulating noise allows for healthy disruptions, or unhealthy disruptions, depending on the actions employed.

The types of actions employed depend on the state of the office or system. That is, the degreee of customisation to the individual or team, is determined by the degree of noise of the initial state of the system. If there is a lot of noise, you may want to consider uniform policies or actions applied across the whole office. If there is very little noise (debate, constructive conversations about work, discussion, laughter, positive general conversations not about work) you may want to consider more specific actions by team, or even by individual.

The key here, I've found through experimentation running an office of 200 staff, is if you're office is in a state of low noise (low engagement) and you implement something highly customised, give staff choices and empower them. Obviously placing trust and empowerment along with clear rules for accountability should be what all managers do, am under no illusions it's what few probably do. In doing the above, with clear boundaries, you will create noise. Mostly positive. Which will create engagement, increase the willingness to engage, which means better problem solving, a higher resilience to crises, a happier and busier office producing better quality work.

Key to implementing this kind of strategy is observation of the management team as it's implemented. As well as being able to trust the leaders / managers in your business to be able to observe. Not sit behind an excel sheet and look at rafts of numbers. They are useless without observing behaviour, they are a waste of space if you don't know your team dynamics. Behaviour is the next topic managers and leaders will raise, as well as being able to trust staff not to take advantage of more freedom. Managers and leaders often don't understand what is most important to them, they will try to do everything they think is right to please so many stakeholders, your as a leader is to keep them focussed.

What is the single most important key measure to that manager or team leader? Why? And how do all the other measures come from that one. From there, the rest comes. They will engage in behaviour if that one key measure is being met. Manage your teams as teams not as a group of individuals.

The end. There is theory here (math if you want if), and I've proven it to work in my office, with hilarious, fun, and culturally enlightening from ethnic, age, and gender perspectives. People always take different approaches, the idea here is to utilise and value those differences, in such a way to make your business more resilient and stable. More creative and adept at finding talent itself, more adept at weak signal assessment when there is change afoot in the wider business environment.

The aim, is to take the above idea and show other business how it can be done.