Chaos is a friend of mine

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and his enemies. â€”Napoleon Bonaparte

Chaos is the “uncertainty sparked by uncharted territory, economic recession, and bubbles of opportunity.”

This is the opening line in Jeremy Gutsche’s book Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change, which presented disorder as a reality in business and in life. Within an unbending culture, chaos will make your company square and uninteresting. But within an adaptive culture, it will steer you through ambiguity and morph into something huge and fabulous. You’ve seen it happen, and you’ve been repeatedly told that business downturns, drastic changes and periods of crisis are no time to retreat. In fact, these epochs of change provide an excellent opportunity for organizations to reinvent and reorganize themselves for success. The evidence is in the great number of iconic companies that not only survived the hard eras, but also were actually founded during harsh milieus, and are still thriving today — Microsoft, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Gillette, IBM, Hyatt, and Fortune magazine. And of course, you’ve heard the story of SM being started during one of the more difficult times in the Philippines.

Gutsche, a trend huntsman and innovation specialist, provides brilliant tips on how to leverage chaos for success. He supports the theory that the “instability of today’s economy is the perfect place for the next great business to find its footing.” Guy Kawasaki, author of Reality Check, seconded the statement when he wrote in the book’s foreword that, “Exploiting Chaos is the quintessential road map for all those who seek opportunity in times of change.” In fact, the next crop of business leaders will train their eyes on the art and science of adaptation approaches using these four important factors as defined by Gutsche. This framework teaches you how to reinvent and alter modalities, whether you are in an area of development and sparkling opportunity or in phases of decline and disappointment.

Culture of revolution. An organization’s culture underlies its ability to adapt, and periods of dramatic change magnify the importance of culture. It has to work to create the culture of change — the ethos of revolution. From this culture you can spark a new paradigm for creative change from which your strategies will be derived. Nurturing an adaptable culture, with leaders united around a common belief, guarantees the fact that even during changing times, the key players sing the same song and pull in the same direction.  

Trend hunting. Improvement and competitive advantage depend on your efficiency in foreseeing trends and spotting the next big thing. Put in energy and continuously work to improve your abilities to forestall the vital looming changes. Sift through all the noise and chaos, amass the trends, and determine the clusters of opportunities that will be built.  Your team’s creativity must focus on the most important opportunities. Anticipate new trends, tendencies or movements and cluster them to reveal the brightest prospects. These will provide your organizations an innovative and strategic advantage. 



Adaptive innovation. In most cases, perfecting human creativity gets one of the biggest budget allocations in government or privately run companies. To jumpstart your team’s competitiveness in your own industry, apply the best practices in adaptive innovation, dwelling on the end state of new customer priorities.

Infectious messaging. The online world has created and continues to improve on its ability in allowing people to share and build on each other’s ideas. Its role as the driving force for the ongoing culture revolution will persist into the future. Take advantage of the information sharing and the resulting open collaboration and you can make your ideas and actions resonate and be ahead of competition. The Internet’s viral nature is a surefire platform to rapidly bring to people’s attention well-packaged, carefully worded, and infectious messages. Clutter-free, brief, relevant propositions travel faster, provoking rapid decision-making, and allowing their users to move ahead of those using more traditional methods.

Many familiar ideas to remain relevant to customer needs were likewise shared by Gutsche. Here are some takeaways:

• You are in a time where you have the “world’s first viral platform for ideas.” Social media provide a wide opportunity for stories to travel. 
You can make your messages better and more infectious by being relentlessly obsessed about your story.  Careful word choice can have an astounding impact on the viral potential of your message.  If you can, test your word choice and see a measured view count for each test. For most products, the goal is immeasurable buzz and word of mouth.  Your use of words must be simple, direct, and supercharged.

• As Jack Welch of GE put it, “Simple messages travel faster, simpler designs reach the market faster, and the elimination of clutter allows faster decision making.” Author Seth Godin echoed the principle, saying, “Simple messages supercharge word of mouth.”

• An outsider should understand your value proposition from your seven words. Your value proposition is your advantage. It’s the unique attribute that explains why the consumer should choose you. Your seven words should pass the “I-have-to-tell-someone-test.” If they don’t, why will someone else care? You can’t expect your message to drive word-of-mouth exposure if you don’t give people a supercharged story.

• In traditional marketing, there is an emphasis on cliché, clever wording, and invented words. In trend hunting you must pursue viral, and that means we place our emphasis on simplicity.

• Innovation really isn’t about market timing as much as it is about creating something that fulfills an unmet need and letting customers know it exists.

• New technologies and creative ideas enable new trends to exist. Those trends then give birth to new platforms for technological research and creative endeavors.

• Even if you have meaningful direction, cultural alignment and execution are paramount to success. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how sexy your Powerpoint strategy slides are if the organization isn’t ready to embrace change, obsess about the customer and pursue an aligned goal.

Exploiting Chaos will serve as a constant reminder that doing things the old way, having fixed expectations and retreating to comfort zones in the face of chaos are the enemies of adaptation.” You must welcome chaos. As Bob Dylan said, “Chaos is my friend.” Chaos is your friend, too. You have to identify it, accept it and exploit it.

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E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating. Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change is available at National Book Store.