Leading Through Chaos - How to Thrive in Uncertainty

It’s fine. We’re fine. Nothing to see here.

Things have been a little crazy lately. Lots of changes and apprehension about the future. As we get closer to the end of the year, now seems like a suitable time to offer some insights into how you can lead confidently when the future seems chaotic.

Let’s start off by acknowledging that engineers love certainty. While math and physics can provide nice, neat answers, the reality is that life is not like that. The only thing certain is change.

With that in mind, here are 3 things you can do to thrive when everything seems uncertain.

1.      Create Certainty

I know, I just said that things are uncertain. But you can’t use that as a reason to do nothing. You need to bound the problem. Make some reasonable assumptions and go with it. Doing this will preserve the sanity of your team, as well as your own and allow you to get stuff done.

Here’s an example:  I once led an engineering team on a government funded development project for a critical piece of flight safety hardware. The project was challenging because it did not have a well-defined set of requirements or deliverable dates from the customer, but we still had an expectation for hardware delivery.

The lack of requirements was a source of frustration for the design team and a detailed schedule was not required by the contract.

To create certainty, I bounded the problem by coaching the team to make informed assumptions about the design requirements to allow them to push conversations forward with the customer. I also created a detailed schedule for the team to work from.

These two things helped immensely because they provided a baseline to measure progress against and lowered stress levels for the group because they were no longer floating aimlessly in space.

2.      Communicate Well

Communicating well is especially important in times of chaos. When things are changing rapidly you need to ensure that the whole team knows about changes promptly.

Please do not be a time hoarder- use the 1/3 2/3 rule. This means if you need someone on your team to do something you get 1/3 of the time and they get 2/3 of the time. So if there are 9 days until something is due, you get 3 days to plan and they get 6 days to do what you are asking them.

Exercise tactical patience- on the flip side of the coin, some information doesn’t need to be shared yet or may not even need to be shared at all. Give the situation time to play out instead of jerking everyone around.

Here’s an example: When I was a company commander in an engineering battalion, my unit was sent on a short notice deployment to Afghanistan. Getting the organization out the door in 60 days was challenging. Part of why we were successful was that we made sure to inform managers of changes quickly. This allowed them time to do what they needed to do with their teams. Conversely, we also exercised tactical patience by taking time to analyze information before we gave it to them. This ensured that we had enough of the correct details so they could do their jobs well.

3.      Be Adaptive and Creative

Chaos doesn’t follow the rules and you shouldn’t either. Solve the problem based on what works. If the existing solution or process doesn’t make sense…find a new one! Don’t settle for “this is how it’s always been done.”  That’s an excuse being made by someone who doesn’t want to do more work. Remember, exceptions can always be made.

Quick example: I led a team of engineers on a project to deliver updated technology data packages to the customer. We weren’t the design authority but handled converting the existing prototype drawings to industry standard and ensured manufacturability at scale. Doing this required a lot of redlines (corrections) and back and forth with stakeholders outside our company. Initially I was told that we had to follow the existing, cumbersome configuration management process to do this. This just wouldn’t work for the rapid pace we needed to work at. So I asked for an exception, wrote and got a new process approved which allowed us to keep schedule.

Never settle for “we can’t do that.”

4. Bonus Tip- Have a good sense of humor.

You have to be able to laugh about the situation and/or at yourself...otherwise its just sad...

And there you have it. Get out there and wrangle some chaos!