In my first job out of college, I had a frenetic boss whom we’ll call Don. Don was all over the place in a quite literal sense: running from desk to desk across the office, talking to people here and there, dashing in and out for cigarettes all day. At the end of 1998, Don had been late for meetings so often that he announced an initiative called “On Time in ’99!” to kick off in the new year.

He didn’t get the chance to implement it. The company I worked for hired an organizational consultant, who, legend has it, identified Don and the cloud of chaos around him as the root cause of virtually all of the various process failures we were experiencing.

Don was fired.

As an organizational consultant myself today, I’m fascinated by this set of events. I feel bad for Don: It seems unlikely that all of the chaos traced back to him. And indeed, things remained pretty chaotic after he departed.

The goal resonates, though: Minimizing chaos is, in my professional experience, one of the healthiest goals an organization can set. Sadly, in today’s environment, this can seem impossible to leaders. Most organizations deal with both a chaotic external world (featuring wild daily gyrations in everything from geopolitics to weather to technology) and a chaotic internal landscape (featuring the level of shifting priorities that comes with the scale and complexity of so many companies today). If 2026 feels especially chaotic, you’re not wrong.

All hope is not lost, though. Leaders can take steps to help people handle chaos before things go off the rails, or at least before things go off the rails entirely. Let’s take a look at four of them.

1. Constantly talk to the teams your team works with.

Poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” and no team is, either. You don’t have to be a big, messy matrix organization to operate in a teams-of-teams manner. Even relatively small companies feature incredible amounts of interdependency between groups.

This phenomenon causes chaos by generating competing priorities. It also exacerbates the chaos that comes in from the outside by multiplying and fragmenting the organization’s strategies to respond to any given event. Imagine a football team with multiple huddles: How would you ever pull off a well-run play?

The sanest organizations I’ve done consulting work with, and the healthiest leadership teams I’ve been a part of myself, all addressed this issue in the same fairly informal way: Leaders got to know who their teams were teaming with, and they stayed in contact with those teams’ leaders.

This may sound straightforward, but once you get to several-hundred-person chunks of organizations, the permutations of connections between teams pile up quickly. So leaders are challenged not to map every interaction for their team but to understand the “mosts”: most frequent, most strategic, and most charged team-to-team interactions.

Once leaders engage in a regular, everyday dialogue about the work their teams are doing together, chaos levels begin to modulate. Multiple leaders can work together to collectively shift people’s priorities to what the organization really needs. They can also minimize collisions between people doing the same or conflicting work.

Often, organizations attempt an emergency version of this as a crisis erupts, only to discover that the leaders they’re hurriedly pulling together have been working in such separate lanes that there’s an incredible amount of context that has to be shared and trust that has to be built before they can mobilize their teams jointly. As the leaders play catch-up, chaos mounts. Leaders who are already in a live conversation with one another have a tremendous edge in this scenario.

Chaos can shake up the corporate chessboard in helpful ways. One C-suite executive (and certified chaos hater) sheepishly admitted to me the other day that “every decent opportunity I’ve gotten has been because things were in disarray.” Again, we may not love what Ashley Goodall so memorably called “life in the blender,” but the most chaotic events do sometimes tee up intriguing opportunities (or even new roles). Especially in an era where people increasingly value horizontal or diagonal growth — building lateral skills through different kinds of exposure, not just marching into more senior roles in a linear fashion — there’s definitely an upside to the corporate ladder getting a good shake now and then.

Chaos can give us all the opportunity for a cleansing laugh. Think about some of your most memorable moments with the teams you’ve worked with. I bet at least one or two are downright silly. When things get chaotic and people choose to see comedy and not tragedy, we can all have some distinctly human fun together. The randomness of the universe is not just frustrating and annoying and exhausting. It can be goofy, too.

The reality of life at any organization is that you can’t fully shield your team from chaos, and per that last strategy, you shouldn’t, either. With the right team-to-team communication, the right space to have the right conversations, and the right protection from bad behavior, your team can grow, get new opportunities, and even chuckle together during chaos.

In Greek mythology, chaos is defined as simply the time before the world was formed. Under that framework, chaos itself is almost immaterial; it’s what comes after that matters. And leaders: That part is what you choose to make of it.