March 25, 2026
Finding stillness in organizational chaos
Many of us experience work as a series of small emergencies. A deadline shifts, someone changes their mind, a cascade of consequences follows. Something fails during the crunchiest moment. The natural response is to match that urgency.
The most effective people I work with do not fight chaos. They don't subscribe to it, move through it without getting tangled, and don't get swept away. Something in them stays quiet even when everything around them is loud. They aren't passive or checked out. More specifically, they know what actually matters right now, and are consistently willing to let go of what doesn't. They ask: are we solving the right problem?
When you're genuinely grounded, you can tell the difference between noise and signal. The meeting that derails isn't derailing you. Your ability to make this distinction depends on whether you're centered or scattered. If you're scattered, everything feels equally important — which means nothing gets proper priority, and everything is queued with a layer of fear. If you're centered, the priority becomes obvious.
What does this look like in practice? Before responding to the next crisis, pause. Thirty seconds is enough. Feel your feet on the floor. Ask yourself what this moment actually needs — not what it appears to need. Most of the time the answer is simpler than the urgency suggests: an acknowledgement, a timeline, an opinion.
Teams sense whether you're panicked or clear. Groups with someone genuinely calm make better decisions faster. They don't waste time on performative urgency. This creates real space for thinking.
When I worked at Meta, we were slowly but surely outgrowing the "move fast and break things" mantra. As we matured and became more deliberate, we assessed risk much more carefully. We gave ourselves space to focus on polish, and create delightful experiences — not just what got the task done or fit the requirement.
The organizations that actually work aren't always the ones moving fastest. They're the ones where people can stay focused on what matters. That focus comes from individuals who refuse to let the chaos become their internal state. They hold a boundary with it. They let it exist without letting it take over.
This matters practically: when you're not exerting energy on agitation, you have energy for problems. When you're not executing under stress, you can actually think about solutions. When you're not reacting to surface turbulence, you can see the deeper patterns that create the turbulence in the first place.
In every company I've worked, ICs have thrown around a very familiar sentence: "Because [HIPPO] said so." The Hippo is the Highest Paid Person's Opinion — a senior leader with a vision who may not be executing alongside UXR, necessarily familiar with the tech debt, or speaking from a place of universal truth. Sometimes they're just riffing. But they hold power, and ICs interpret their ideation as prescriptive. When ICs follow leadership directions at face value without considering the why, simply out of fear of controversy, they make less deliberate decisions. What follows is a "fix it later" culture, cycling through Fast Follows indefinitely.
I think the next few years are going to require us human designers to practice this skill of stillness more than ever. Organizations are getting more complex, more distributed, more responsive to things no one controls. The old command-and-control approach is breaking down. What comes next won't be tidy. It will be something like organized adaptation — where individuals stay grounded enough to make good decisions moment by moment without needing permission for everything.
The people who will actually feel alive in that environment are the ones who've learned to be still inside it — not frozen. You can move decisively from a place of quiet. In fact, that's when your movement works best.
The chaos isn't going away. But your relationship to it can change. That change starts with deciding that your internal stability matters. It's not a luxury — it is a practical tool, and a daily practice. It's how you do the work that actually means something.
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