The Chaos Principle

Risk. We reward it, mitigate it, tolerate it. We have a threshold for it. We also have a much under-appreciated need for it. We don?t often talk about our ?need? for risk, but we must have one, since we continually make decisions, a process that is, by its very nature, risky.

In fact, I think we need more than risk in our lives. We need chaos. Everyone needs a different amount of chaos, but the amount of chaos an individual needs must be in balance at all times, across all the various parts of his or her life. Everyone has some. Many young people, for example, have no trouble finding steady, rewarding work out of school, but can?t find a potential spouse to save their lives. According to the Chaos Principle, that?s not for a lack of viable suitors, but because their chaos requirements are so high (relatively speaking) that they need the craziness of being single to offset the steadiness of a rewarding job.

Other examples of how this theory impacts my own life:

I tend to drive more aggressively when behind the wheel of a safer car, thus keeping my total driving chaos level constant.
I can’t keep both my closet and my desk organized at the same time… but on the other hand, I can’t have them both be messy at the same time, either. My balance is that both are reasonably organized, or that one is well organized and the other not so much. If I’m in balance and I clean one up completely, something big goes wrong with the other.
My schedule always has some slack in it. If I’m overly planned, I’m guaranteed to hit traffic and/or a parade that keeps me from executing my schedule as planned.
My total investments always carry a degree of risk. As I make bets on my business, my investments get safer.

I have learned that I can go out of balance for about three days before things start pulling back to alignment. Other people can go longer, others not as long. But eventually, I always come back to balance. I know when the other shoe will drop.

The interesting thing (to me) is that chaos is constant across my entire life as opposed to being “area specific”… the above examples notwithstanding, I have been able to tighten up specific areas of my life by spreading a small amount of additional chaos over many others. This idea simultaneously validates and calls into question the idea of the balanced scorecard–that system for measuring how well an organization or individual is setting itself up for lasting success. One the one hand, if my Chaos Principle is right, then a taking a holistic, “balanced” approach to success is a good idea. However, the way to do it shouldn?t be to pick target goals in each quadrant… instead, what you should do is take stock of your current balance, accept areas where you fall short of ideal levels as reflective of your need for chaos, pick a single area in a single quadrant to “fix”, and then also pick a floater metric that you are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve your goal… because until you change your (or your organization’s) chaos requirement, you will likely need to maintain your current level of chaos, so any goal you achieve will be at the expense of some other area of life.

(Btw, the trick to keeping chaos to a minimum with your finances, schedule, and home is to delegate these things to an accountant, assistant, and spouse/roommate who have significantly lower chaos levels than yourself.)

I’m pretty sure this same principle applies to humanity on a large scale, too. Different parts of the globe seem to need different amounts of chaos. Try to bring order to an area that has a high chaos requirement, and watch out! Try to bring chaos to an area with a low chaos requirement, and the result will be an offsetting amount of overregulation.

That’s just the way it is.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.