Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / What Disorder Reveals
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled What Disorder Reveals. Here we go. I want to start with a claim that sounds wrong until you sit with it for a minute. The safest company to run during a genuine crisis is Is rarely the one playing it the safest. Here's the line behind that claim attributed to Sun Tzu. He said, In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity. Chaos does one specific thing to an organization, and it is worth naming precisely, because the word chaos gets used loosely and loses its meaning. Chaos removes predictability, and predictability is the thing that normally protects an average strategy from being exposed. When customers behave the way they always have, when competitors move at the pace they always have, a mediocre plan can coast for a long time on sheer momentum, indistinguishable from a good one. The moment the ground actually shifts, that protection disappears all at once. A weak strategy fails loudly and immediately, in full view of the entire organization, while a genuinely sharp read of the new situation suddenly has room to win outright, uncontested. Because many competitors are still oriented toward a world that no longer exists. Sun Tzu was not arguing that chaos is secretly good news. He was making a narrower, more useful claim. Chaos is the condition under which the real gap between strong strategic thinking and mediocre strategic thinking becomes visible to everyone at once. Because stability has been quietly hiding that gap the entire time. The advantage was always sitting there. It simply required disorder to become visible. I think about how this plays out inside a company during an actual disruption, whether it be a supply chain failure, a sudden regulatory change, a competitor's surprise move. The instinctive organizational reflex is to spend every available resource trying to restore the previous state of normal as quickly as possible, treating the disruption purely as a problem to be resolved. The leaders who come out ahead tend to ask a different, sharper question in the same moment. What can now be seen or now be done that genuinely could not be seen or done a month earlier, before the old arrangement broke open? That question only has a useful answer during the narrow window window while things remain unsettled. Once a new normal solidifies, that opening closes again. Here's where the quote commonly gets misread. People hear it as a call to seek out chaos. To disrupt things deliberately in search of advantage or to treat stability itself as the enemy. That's not the argument. Sun Tzu spent most of the art of war describing methods for avoiding unnecessary chaos and fighting only on terms of one's own choosing. The point is narrower and more disciplined. When disorder arrives, regardless of what you wanted, and it eventually always does, the correct response is not panic aimed purely at restoration. It is a clear-eyed search for what the disorder has just made newly possible. This has a direct and increasingly important implication for how leaders use modern tools during real disruption. A model trained on historical data is, by its nature, built to smooth chaos into something that resembles familiar past patterns. That is precisely the wrong instinct at precisely the moment a genuinely new opening exists, because a truly new opportunity does not resemble anything already sitting in a training set. The tool will tend to pull a leader back toward the comfortable and the previously seen. Recognizing a real, unprecedented opening inside real disorder is still a distinctly human act of interpretation, one that depends on judgment about a specific, unfamiliar moment, rather than pattern matching against everything that came before it. So here's what I would suggest. Whatever disruption arrives next, and one always does. Resist the instinct to pour every resource into restoring the old normal as fast as possible. Instead, ask directly what can now be seen or attempted that genuinely could not have been a month earlier. Ask who else in the room has spotted an opening they have not yet said out loud, because disorder tends to make people quieter, not louder, right when speaking up matters most. Chaos does not manufacture opportunity out of nothing. It exposes an opportunity that was sitting there the entire time, hidden beneath the surface of a stable, unquestioned routine that nobody had any reason to examine until the routine itself broke.