In Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, Antonio García Martinéz introduces what is — at least for me — a new metaphor: the chaos monkey.

He explains it as a mechanism by which to “test a product or website’s resiliency against random server failures.” In fact, it is an organizational self-assessment with almost unlimited applications.

Martinez then explains that “the software chaos monkey shuts down random machines and processes at unexpected times. The challenge is to have your particular service — Facebook’s messages, Google’s Gmail, your startup blog, whatever — survive the monkey’s degradation.”

So what?

In my opinion, a great deal.

What Martinez is describing is — in effect — self-induced disruption of an operation in order to determine to what extent it can withstand disruption that is externally created.

In some respects, the chaos monkey resembles a canary in a coalmine except that it can do more, much more than sound an alarm. The nature and extent of the chaos that this creature can cause will indicate the nature and extent of an organization’s vulnerability, not only to competition in the marketplace but also to becoming hostage to what Jim O’Toole so apt characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of comfort.”