{"id":1196,"date":"2017-02-17T20:16:34","date_gmt":"2017-02-18T04:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/b-spoke.net\/?p=1196"},"modified":"2026-06-29T22:00:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T22:00:29","slug":"does-chaos-really-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thirdactmedia.com\/b-spoke\/2017\/02\/17\/does-chaos-really-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Chaos Really Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"
A Seven Minute Read<\/h6>\n

A recent trip led to a serious crisis of faith. After successfully dodging traffic in what passes for \u201ccrosswalks\u201d in Mumbai, where scooters and motorcycles ignore traffic lights and cars toot horns to change lanes, I found myself in a late-night taxi heading from the Madgoan train station to the western coast of India.<\/h3>\n

As in the city, drivers prefer the middle of the road, presumably to avoid scooters and sleeping dogs. That is all swell, until someone coming the other way is doing the exact same thing.<\/h3>\n

It was, quite simply, the most terrifying ride I\u2019d ever taken (until that point; a subsequent journey through Aurangabad topped it). I\u2019ve been petrified on the world\u2019s roadways before \u2013 dodging swarms of scooter-riding Taiwanese families (mom, dad, two kids), cutting across seven lanes of oncoming traffic and mounting a curb to get to a Chinese factory, driving across the Everglades in an oil-deprived VW Bug one Spring Break \u2013 but Indian driving is its own beast.<\/h3>\n

The road, barely two cars wide, twisted through rolling hills; on a dark narrow path, with less than 100 feet visibility, that \u201cmiddle of the road\u201d practice is problematic.<\/h3>\n

The most frightening was trying to pass a small red Hyundai, piloted by whom I can only believe was my driver\u2019s arch-nemesis. We would pull in tight on his bumper, honk, and attempt a lurch to his side \u2013 even though he wouldn\u2019t give up his middle \u201clane\u201d. His leaning into hairpin turns provided our chance to strike; never mind the complete lack of visibility of and to oncoming traffic. We were thwarted several times; just as we would draw even with him, oncoming headlights would force us to slam on the brakes, downshift, and duck back behind the red car, just inches from the other vehicles.<\/h3>\n

This was all playing out between 80 and 100 km\/hour, on a road posted for 50. I tried to distract myself by reading my iPad, but eventually put it back in my bag \u2013 in the inevitable head-on collision, I didn\u2019t want anything made of glass in my lap.<\/h3>\n

It seems that every time James Bond is being chased, one of the pursuit vehicles \"dsc02293\"slams into a large, slower moving (or oncoming) truck, one usually filled with chickens or some other flocky mess. Turns out, that\u2019s not just an overused trope \u2013 it really is a Thing. When we finally overtook the red Hyundai, and pulled back into our lane (narrowly missing oncoming scooters, of course), we immediately came upon a large delivery truck, puttering along at about 30 with no lights on. We slammed on the brakes, downshifted, upshifted, and passed \u2013 forcing the motorcycles going the other way to navigate around us.<\/h3>\n

We finally slowed when we approached a crossroad \u2013 traffic management consisted of two, staggered barricades that we needed to drive around (painted \u201cStop Goa Police\u201d; I presume there was missing punctuation, and this wasn\u2019t a protest).<\/h3>\n

I learned this was tame \u2013 a pleasant evening drive \u2013 compared to real daytime traffic, which added multiple lanes, buses, scooters merging from all sides, cricket-playing children, and stray cattle wandering through.<\/h3>\n

Needless to say, the \u201cpucker factor\u201d, on a scale of one to ten, hovered around 12. Worse, this felt like an affront to \"processes\"<\/a> my process-centric brain: the noise and bedlam \u2013 the sheer anarchy –\u00a0 should be untenable, right? There were a few things I did not<\/em> see, though, at any point on my journeys: an accident of any kind; a vehicle on the side of the road; roadkill, or; vehicles with massive dents, scrapes or scratches. There was no evidence of road rage.<\/p>\n

How could this be? How could there be such unmitigated chaos, and still appear to have satisfactory results? Are the skeptics right \u2013 it’s better to just let people do their own thing because \u201cprocess\u201d is unnecessary, only making getting things done bureaucratic and arduous?<\/p>\n

So here I was, losing my religion in the backseat of an Aurangabadian taxi.<\/p>\n

Does chaos actually work? When Tom Peters described how to \u201cthrive\u201d on chaos, he wasn\u2019t advocating complete pandemonium, was he?<\/p>\n

Chaos Defined<\/h4>\n

In general terms, \u201cchaos\u201d is rooted in uncertainty. When people talk about \u201cthe chaos of Brexit\u201d, for example, they\u2019re really describing an inability to predict what\u2019s going to happen next. The \u201cchaos\u201d ensues when multiple people take action \u2013 but in fundamentally different ways, going in different directions, generating conflict and overloading their systems.<\/p>\n

Chaos comes from poor planning: ambiguous goals, lack of clarity on how actions tie back to those goals, lack of accountability, incomplete or missing fallback plans, no self-correction mechanisms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"dsc02290\"None of this was happening on the roads \u2013 it was frenetic, and utterly incomprehensible. Yet I seemed to be the only one stressed. My drivers never once seemed to break a sweat.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you manage to drive with all this traffic and not get in an accident?\u201d I asked one of my drivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there not traffic in America?\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot like this. When people leave their lanes, or enter from the sides, other cars tend to crash into them,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou just have to understand,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

Diagnosing at the Right Level<\/h4>\n

Yes, it was<\/em> utterly incomprehensible \u2013 to me, the outsider. To the person on the inside<\/em>, the driver \u2013 really, the only relevant player \u2013 it made complete sense. He understood the \u201crules\u201d such as they were, and he was confident that other drivers were operating from the same playbook; thus, he could predict how neighboring vehicles would behave, and could be as reactive or proactive as necessary. It was a matter of being flexible in his environment, not random \u2013 and not really chaotic.<\/p>\n

I realized, too, that this was also a matter of perspective. Not just \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d, but from a holistic sense. Scientists who study Chaos Theory recognize this: the universe, looking at recent data, seems stable; however, over longer periods of time, the universe\u2019s behavior is, almost literally, the textbook definition of chaos. \u201cWeather\u201d is chaotic, for instance, \u201cclimate\u201d is not.<\/p>\n

From where I sat, randomly watching scooters cut in from nowhere, cows strolling along the curb, and vehicles moving at a wide variety of speeds, it looked like chaos. The driver\u2019s situational awareness was completely different \u2013 he was systematically watching his direct field of impact, a much more specific and controlled bubble of information. If you pulled back in a Michael Bay-crane shot and looked at the flow of traffic across several kilometers \u2013 the \u201c30,000 foot view\u201d \u2013 it would appear as a natural ebb and flow.<\/p>\n

Part of diagnosing whether or not the process is efficient or effective is making sure you\u2019re looking at it at the right level.<\/p>\n