World-class teams metabolize chaos. Calm teams break.
Most leaders chase calm. They file down surprises, tune meetings, and polish checklists. They hunt surprises like a hospital infection team. Calm passes for competence because it looks like control. It keeps leaders out of blame.
Structure decides where ownership lands. Casts centralize it. Good structure distributes it.
So companies build casts: meetings that decide for you, roles that absorb risk, rituals that launder uncertainty into status updates. The failure mode has a name: exporting responsibility upward. Decisions centralize. Ownership diffuses. Everyone looks aligned while nobody owns the outcome.
It feels like good management—absorbing chaos so others can focus. But taking responsibility for people isn’t the same as developing people who can take responsibility. The former creates calm. The latter creates capability. Only one survives contact with reality.
There’s another way: directed chaos—direct the storms instead of absorbing them. You’re not manufacturing problems. You’re removing the structures that hide them.
The pattern
One move makes this work: remove a cast, then add structure.
Removal alone sparks panic. Structure alone creates theater. The move is paired. You take away the thing that did the thinking. You replace it with something that makes thinking survivable.
A cast is any structure that does the thinking for you—a process, a role, a meeting that has become a substitute for judgment. It prevents injury. Left on too long, it prevents growth. Good structure is different: not something that centralizes decisions, but something that distributes ownership. It doesn’t do the thinking—it makes thinking unavoidable.
Give people ownership. Stop absorbing it for them.
The meeting that couldn’t die
When I arrived at GrowthLoop, one Scrum meeting was the company’s spine: 30 minutes for 25 engineers and 2 PMs across five “teams.” A round-robin of thin updates, a parade of “blocked,” and a dopamine hit of alignment.
Everyone left nodding. Work still slipped. Tidy, performative calm.
Underneath, work was ticket soup: ad hoc initiatives owned by “teams” who shared blame but not conviction. The meeting was the cast that absorbed responsibility so nobody had to own the outcome.
Everyone “loved” the meeting, but if a meeting can’t die, it’s not a tool—it’s a religion.
So I didn’t refactor it. I deleted it.
We didn’t stop coordinating. We stopped pretending coordination was a meeting. Planning didn’t go away. The fiction that one meeting could plan for everyone did.
The deletion produced the most valuable artifact in the company: empty space. Within hours my Slack filled with DMs asking for a replacement ceremony, a new playbook, a definitive timebox. I said no— not because structure is bad, but because this structure had become a cast.
The first week was loud in the right way. Teams argued about planning. Leads looked around and realized there was no parent to escalate to. Two leads tried to resurrect the central meeting and learned why it existed: to export responsibility upward. Without a center, there was nowhere to export it. The weight landed on them.
Then the experimentation started. Some did it well on the first pass. Others stumbled, then learned. Either way, they were thinking. That was the point.
But deletion alone is just chaos. Chaos needs a wall to push against.
Freedom without structure is chaos. Structure without freedom is bureaucracy. The magic is in the tension.
So we added structure that doesn’t steer for you.
Projects became the atomic unit of work: a bounded bet with a finish line. Each project had a load-bearing owner—not a committee. We named the role champion, and that word did real work.
A champion isn’t a PM with a new hat. It’s the person who carries the project when it gets heavy. They cut scope, pull in the right people, and tell the truth. Their name stays attached when the project is ugly. If there’s no champion, it’s not a project. It’s a wish.
Every six weeks champions sit with the exec team and walk through the guts in plain language. No slide theater. No green/yellow/red. Just: what’s true, what changed, what’s at risk, and what you’re doing about it.
That review isn’t approval. It’s forced contact with reality—an engineered place to surface uncertainty on purpose and treat it as a signal, not a sin.
That was the pattern: stop absorbing the weight, let it land where it belongs.
The payoff
There’s a quiet moment when it starts to stick.
People start solving problems before you know the problems exist. PMs stop apologizing for slowing features—they ask what they can do to help. Engineers defend customers with test suites they wrote without being asked.
Ownership isn’t a belief you argue someone into. It’s a weight you let them feel.
The people who thrive here don’t just tolerate turbulence—they generate it. I call them exothermic: they produce more energy than they consume. They bring drafts instead of questions. They kill ambiguity for everyone around them.
Directed chaos doesn’t just distribute ownership—it builds exothermic people.
The invitation
None of this is a plea for reckless change. Unmanaged chaos breaks people. Directed chaos makes them.
You stop absorbing the weight. Let it land where it belongs. You give them structure that makes bearing it survivable—not structure that bears it for them. And you don’t flinch when they stumble.
Resilience isn’t something you can give people. It’s something they build by going through storms. If you want a resilient company, stop promising calm seas.
Give them storms worth weathering. Teach them to yearn for the sea. Then give them a ship worth sailing.