Chaos: Nothing Holds Still Long Enough to Be Learned

On 2 October, the consultancy Sia published The Change Report, drawn from a survey of 1,450 employees and leaders across North America, Europe, the UK and Ireland, the UAE and Asia Pacific. Of those asked, 85 per cent said they were going through at least one workplace change at the time.

That figure on its own describes an ordinary year. The more telling findings sit beside it. Of the same respondents, 41 per cent said their organisation tries to "do everything at once", and 21 per cent said teams are "left to figure out tradeoffs on their own".

The report's own reading is that the difficulty is not the amount of change. It describes environments where "priorities shift before previous changes stabilize", and it names the result change collision rather than change overload.

The difference between change and chaos

Change has a before and an after. A team is reorganised, a process is replaced, a system goes live, and for a period everyone works out how things are now done.

That period is how a structure is learned. The third time a type of request is handled the same way, a habit has become a norm, and nobody has to think about it again.

Chaos is what happens when the next change lands before the last one has been repeated three times. No norm forms, and each piece of work is handled as if for the first time, because in effect it is.

So the condition is not a large quantity of change. It is a rate: change arriving faster than the norms that would absorb it can settle.

What it is usually blamed on

A professional working inside this is offered a familiar account of their difficulty. They struggle with change. They need more resilience, more comfort with ambiguity, more agility.

The account assumes there is something to adapt to. Adaptation is the learning of a new pattern, and it works when the pattern holds long enough to be learned.

Where priorities are redirected before work finishes, and decisions are reversed after it starts, the person is not failing to adapt. They are adapting correctly, each time, to a pattern that is then withdrawn. If the ground moves again before the last move has settled, what exactly is the person supposed to adapt to?

The cost lands on thinking. In a settled structure, the question of what currently matters has an answer that does not need working out each morning. In a chaotic one it does, and the capacity spent reconstructing the current state is capacity not spent on the work.

Where the condition comes from

The circumstances associated with chaotic work are specific, and none of them describes the person inside it. Read together, they explain why the condition persists rather than passing.

Some are about rate. Priorities change faster than work can be re-pointed at them, so nothing is finished before it is redirected. Several changes to strategy, personnel or process land at once, and demand arrives in unpredictable volume and order, so there is no basis on which to plan.

Some are about work that cannot be closed. Decisions are reversed after work has started, so effort is repeatedly undone. What counts as done keeps shifting, so work cannot be cleared out of the system.

Some are about the picture. There is no single view of what is in flight, so nobody can see the whole to bring order to it. Communication about the changes lags the changes themselves, so people act on a picture that is already out of date.

Some are about authority. A leadership or ownership change has left it unclear who now decides, so decisions stall or contradict, and ownership of individual pieces of work is unclear, so pieces are dropped or duplicated with no way to tell which. The norms for how work is sequenced, assigned and closed have broken down, so each piece is handled ad hoc.

The last two hold the rest in place. A crisis has overridden normal processes, and the temporary override has not been lifted. Every condition is treated as temporary, so no new stable structure is built to replace the one that broke.

The temporary arrangement that lasts

This is the point the misattribution misses. A temporary arrangement is exempt from design, because nobody writes down how work is now assigned if the arrangement is expected to end next month.

So the interim runs without the things a permanent structure would have been given: an owner, a definition of done, a way of deciding what comes first. If it then lasts a year, it has been the structure for a year, and it was never built.

The person inside it is told the disruption is temporary, and that is the reason nothing is done about it. The phrase meant to reassure is the one that prevents the repair.

What tends to bring order back, and who can supply it

The conditions associated with relief are structural, and they divide between what one person can do and what needs someone else's authority.

Four are within reach of the individual. Identifying a small set of stable, protected commitments to anchor to while the wider structure is unsettled. Separating what is genuinely unpredictable from what remains within structural control, so effort goes where it can hold.

Keeping a personal record of what is in flight and its current state, where no shared view exists. Noting where work has been redone after a reversal, so the cost of churn is evidenced rather than silently absorbed.

None of the four creates stability. Each creates a fixed point, which is a different thing, and the most a single person can supply inside an arrangement that will not hold still.

The other nine need somebody else.

The number of active priorities reduced, with agreement on what is paused. A clear answer on which changes are settled and which are still moving. The norms for sequencing and assigning work re-established.

A decision on whether the current state is a temporary crisis or the new norm, with the override then lifted or made standard. Clarity on who now decides. An owner for each piece of work.

Decisions that hold once work has started, or a recognised cost when they do not. A single view of what is in flight. A fixed definition of done.

What the nine share is that none can be achieved by adapting. Each needs someone with the standing to say that a thing is now settled.

What a leader sees

The professional sees their own work being redirected. They cannot see whether the redirection came from one source or from four, whether colleagues are being pointed at the same piece of work from different directions, or whether the crisis that justified the override ended in the spring.

A leader is positioned to see that, and to act on it. They can identify a small set of stable, protected commitments that anchor the team, reduce the number of active priorities explicitly with clear agreement on what is paused, and communicate often and honestly enough that uncertainty does not fill with assumption.

They can also separate what is genuinely unpredictable from what could be stabilised with better structure. Above all, they can distinguish a temporary crisis from a structural norm that needs a more fundamental response.

That last distinction belongs to the leader alone. An individual can suspect the emergency is over, but only someone with authority over the arrangement can say so, and then either lift the override or rebuild it as a structure.

What a leader usually lacks is the distribution. Chaotic work shows up in ordinary reporting as slower delivery and work done twice, and both read as performance problems belonging to individuals.

When the signal rises across a team and nothing distinguishes it, the organisation sees a group of capable people who have become unreliable, and responds to the people. The structure that was never rebuilt stays exactly as it is.

Opinion: Adaptation Needs Something to Adapt To

Our position is that chaotic work is a failure of settlement rather than a failure of adaptability. The change is not the problem. The problem is that nothing is declared finished, so the structure never stops moving long enough to be learned.

Advising people to become more comfortable with change treats the rate as fixed and the person as the variable. It is the other way round. The rate is a set of decisions, about how many priorities run at once and how long an override is allowed to last, and those decisions have owners.

The cost accumulates quietly. A person who has to rebuild the picture of what matters each week spends the thinking that should have gone into the work on finding out what the work currently is. Over a year that looks like a loss of judgement, and it is diagnosed as one.

The provocation we would leave open is a test any team can run. Ask five people in the same team to name, separately, three things about how their work is done that will not change before the end of the quarter.

Where the five lists match, there is a structure, however much else is moving. Where they do not, the team is adapting to five different organisations, and none of them is the one that exists.

Your response

If your team runs the five person test, the result is the response we would most like to read. So is one observation about how changes reach your work: how often, from how many directions, and whether anything has ever been declared settled.

Describe the arrangement rather than how it feels, and leave the organisation unnamed. Responses are welcome in the comments where this post is shared on the HumanSafe Intelligence LinkedIn Page.

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process:
The author made use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies in the preparation of this post.

Sources
Sia, "The Change Report: A Report on Attitudes, Perceptions, and Impact of Workplace Change," 2026 edition, survey of 1,450 employees and leaders, 2 October 2026

The contents of this article are for informational purposes only and do not constitute professional, legal, or financial advice.