On Leadership & Chaos
Several years ago, my family took a trip to Cancun. My wife Amy and I brought our three kids, Jack, Abby, and Cal, while they were still young enough that a trip like that was still easy to pull off. I was in the best shape of my adult life. I’d just run my first marathon. I’d spent my teens and twenties as a lifeguard and a swim instructor. The water had never been something I was afraid of.
The ocean was rough that day, but people were in it, playing in the waves, so my two youngest and I waded in too. The warning flags were up. I noticed the current pulling, felt it drag us down the beach, and we reset and went back in anyway, because the water looked the way it had looked a hundred times before.
I went to bring the kids in. They listened and started back toward shore. I turned to follow them.
I’ve since heard the phrase, never turn your back on the ocean. That’s exactly what I did. A wave hit me and I couldn’t touch bottom. Another hit, and I still couldn’t right myself. I knew which way the current had been pulling, so I tried to swim with it, and it didn’t help. I was scared, and for the first time in my life in the water, I was doing everything I believed was correct and it wasn’t working. A lifeguard reached me before it went further than a bad scare. But for a few minutes, I was genuinely unsure how it was going to end.
Chaos does not have one face. It has five.
I’ve spent twenty years watching organizations, and myself, try to manage chaos as though it were a single, undifferentiated thing. It isn’t. In my experience it shows up as one of five distinct states, and each one demands something different from the person trying to respond to it.
Crisis is the one everyone recognizes, the narrowing of vision to the next five minutes, the moment the water actually has you. But the other four are quieter, and more common, and I’ve lived through each of them.
Hopelessness isn’t the absence of effort. It’s the moment effort stops paying you back and you stop noticing you’ve quit trying. I chased two promotions in eighteen months, made the final round both times, and was told, warmly and specifically, that nothing I could have done differently would have changed the outcome. When a third opportunity opened, I already knew, before I sat down, that the conversation was a formality. I didn’t consciously give up. I just quietly stopped applying, stopped mentioning other options to Amy, and told myself I was being practical. That’s not peace. It just looks like it from a distance.
Avoidance doesn’t look like avoidance from the inside. It looks like prioritization. Early in my career, I had a young employee on my team who was well liked, easy to be around, and genuinely underperforming in ways I noticed from his first year. I gave him grace because he was new. In year two I saw the same patterns, more entrenched, and gave him slightly more direct feedback, still less than the moment called for. By year three, I finally gave him the plain, corrective conversation that should have happened two years earlier, and the outcome was worse for everyone involved than it needed to be, him included. I’ve learned to test myself with one question when I’m holding something back: if our positions were reversed, would I want to know. The answer is almost always yes.
Overwhelmed doesn’t always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like showing up. I have the pictures from my older kids’ games and performances. I have the fact of my attendance. What I often don’t have is the memory, because my mind stayed on the parent meeting I was dreading or the email I’d just gotten. I wasn’t absent from those days. I was absent from the only version of them anyone else remembers.
Spinning is the one most easily mistaken for progress. I learned early as a lifeguard that a person who is actually drowning is silent, nearly submerged, conserving what’s left. The loud, frantic splashing everyone pictures is usually a swimmer in distress, still fighting, grabbing at anything within reach, a rope, a life ring, another swimmer, not out of strategy but instinct. In organizations, spinning looks like motion. It looks like busy. It produces the feeling of momentum without any of the outcomes, and it’s exhausting precisely because you end the day depleted with nothing to point to.
You rarely feel only one of these at a time, and you almost never see clearly which one you’re in.
Chaos doesn’t announce itself with a label. Most of the time it’s two or three of these at once, avoidance shading into overwhelm, hopelessness disguising itself as spinning, and the combination makes each one harder to name, not easier.
Here’s the pattern I notice looking back at all five stories. I understood every one of them late. The hopelessness took years, and only came into focus after I stumbled onto an article on burnout that finally gave me language for what I’d been calling “fine.” The avoidance I only saw clearly once I was years removed from it, replaying what three years of grace actually cost the person I was avoiding. The overwhelm I only recognized once my youngest was old enough that I could compare the father I’d become to the one I’d been for my older two, a comparison that only existed because enough time had passed to make it. The spinning I understood almost by accident, teaching someone else the difference between drowning and distress and hearing myself explain something I had never once applied to my own life.
None of that insight arrived while it would have done the most good. It arrived years after the people closest to me had already lived through the cost of it.
That delay is the actual problem, not the five faces themselves.
Hindsight isn’t a strategy. It’s what you’re left holding when nobody closer to the moment could show you what you were doing while you were still doing it.
A coach or mentor’s real value isn’t wisdom you don’t already have somewhere in you. It’s distance you cannot manufacture for yourself while you’re standing inside something. A good one compresses years into a conversation, because they’re outside the current and can name the pattern while it’s still happening, not a decade later when the only thing left to do with it is write about it.
I’m not writing this because I finally have it figured out. I’m writing it because it took me most of two decades to see clearly what a good coach or mentor could have helped me see in months, and I’d rather hand you the shortcut than watch you take the long way I took.