Hello Chaos, My Old Friend: What I Learned from the Messiest Projects

Based on a talk delivered at NZ Game Developer’s Conference October 2024. Video available at https://www.manonfire.org/speaking - I am open to inquiries about speaking engagements.

There's a particular sound in our minds when reality breaks. It sounds like railway iron being bent sideways. 

These tracks in Canterbury, New Zealand weren't Photoshopped. They're the result of some of the highest ground accelerations ever recorded in an earthquake - a reminder that reality can exceed our imaginations....

This is the story of what happens when our frameworks fail. When the processes and structures we rely on collapse, and we enter what I've come to call the tangle - that psychological space where you've lost sight of both where you started and where you're trying to go.

The tangle isn't unique to disasters. It appears in startups when hypergrowth shatters company culture. It emerges in creative projects when vision meets constraint. It surfaces in any endeavor that pushes past the boundaries of what we think we can handle.

I've spent years studying this space - partly by choice, mostly by circumstance. From the institutional collapse of a city to the transformation of a 400-person company into a 2,000-person global entity, from troubled game developments to investigations of historical trauma. Each experience revealed patterns about how humans and organisations behave when pushed beyond their limits.

More importantly, each revealed something about how we might navigate through chaos when our usual maps become meaningless.

When Theory Meets Catastrophe

Every project management textbook starts with the same essential ingredients for success: a clear goal, good process, the right people, adequate resources, supportive stakeholders, and effective leadership. When these elements align, work flows smoothly. Projects deliver. Life makes sense.

Then there's reality.

In February 2011, Christchurch experienced a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, the largest of five major quakes in a sequence. The initial emergency response was exemplary - one of the best-coordinated disaster responses ever recorded. Search and rescue teams performed with incredible professionalism. People were saved. Fires were contained.

The real challenge emerged in the aftermath. The earthquakes didn't just damage buildings - they shattered the entire institutional framework of a city. Christchurch City Council effectively collapsed. Insurance companies fled. Hundreds of associated organisations crumbled under unprecedented pressures.

When institutions face challenges they were never designed to handle, the cracks appear in more than just the buildings.

The conventional frameworks for operation became meaningless. You couldn't "just show up to work on Monday" when your workplace was in the red zone. You couldn't follow normal processes when the entire context for those processes had vanished. You couldn't maintain stakeholder relationships when those stakeholders were dealing with their own existential crises.

More insidiously, the pressure began to transform the humans involved. People working at the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority weren't just showing up to a challenging job - they were going home to houses with cracks in the ceiling, to neighbourhoods where mysterious liquefaction bogs bubbled at night, to a city where aftershocks arrived like freight trains at random intervals. The distinction between professional challenge and personal crisis blurred, then disappeared entirely.

This pattern - the collapse of frameworks followed by the erosion of human resilience - repeats across different scales and contexts. At the fintech company Xero, we watched it play out during hypergrowth. A company that thrived on personal connections and shared culture tried to maintain that spirit while adding hundreds of new employees per month. People arrived keen to contribute but found themselves lost in an organisation that was rewriting itself daily.

When Reality Exits the Building

The most dangerous moment in any crisis isn't the initial shock - it's when reality begins to slip away. In a video game project called Blood Drive, what started as a promising opportunity with major publisher Activision gradually transformed into something unrecognisable. Ask ten people on the team what game they were making, and you'd get ten different answers. The original vision eroded under the weight of changing executives, shrinking budgets, and compressed timelines.

This dissolution of shared reality is frighteningly common. At the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, even the most resilient professionals began to show signs of deep trauma after months of processing horrific testimonies. The work was vital - but it was consuming people who were absolutely committed to seeing it through.

These situations create a peculiar form of collective delusion. Teams locked in crisis mode begin telling each other stories that drift further from reality. Leadership makes impossible promises. Everyone nods along because acknowledging the truth feels too threatening. The organisation enters a kind of waking dream state, disconnected from external reference points.

Shackleton's ship, about to be crushed by Antarctic ice. When your vessel is being destroyed by forces beyond your control, what do you do next?

This brings us to Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance expedition of 1915. If you want to understand how to navigate when everything falls apart, this is the masterclass.

Shackleton's mission to cross Antarctica ended before it began. His ship became trapped in pack ice, was slowly crushed, and sank. His team was stranded on drifting ice flows, thousands of miles from civilization, in the middle of World War I. No one knew where they were. No one was coming to help.

The situation was objectively hopeless. Yet Shackleton's response provides a template for dealing with catastrophic failure that remains relevant today. He didn't rely on complex frameworks or elaborate processes. He stripped everything back to fundamentals.

Navigation Through the Impossible

Shackleton's approach, though he never articulated it this way, aligned perfectly with what military strategists now call the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. In crisis, this cycle becomes your lifeline.

Observe the reality of your situation, without flinching. Orient yourself to what that reality means, right now. Decide on the next immediate action. Act - then start the loop again.

The beauty of this framework lies in its simplicity. When you're psychologically reduced to a narrow bandwidth under extreme pressure, complexity becomes your enemy. You need principles you can hold onto when everything else is spinning.

Shackleton faced a clear, if daunting, equation: The nearest help was 800 miles away across the world's most treacherous ocean, at a whaling station on South Georgia island. With salvaged lifeboats, limited supplies, and no modern navigation equipment, he led a small crew through hurricane-force winds and freezing seas to reach help. Their success relied on five key principles that apply to any crisis:

The Chaos Survival List

1. Reconnect with Reality Raw honesty about your situation is non-negotiable. Not the stories you're telling each other, not the aspirational version, but the unvarnished truth. This grounds everything that follows.

2. Set and Communicate a Clear Goal Leadership often retreats in crisis, huddling in private meetings. Instead, establish a clear direction and communicate it relentlessly. Everyone needs to understand exactly what mountain you're trying to climb.

3. Movement is Life, Stasis is Death When in crisis, the temptation is either to freeze or to flail. Both are fatal. Choose purposeful movement. Small steps forward beat grand but paralyzed plans.

4. Trust, Trust, Trust, Trust, Trust Under extreme pressure, trust becomes your most precious resource. Build it through transparency, consistent action, and genuine care for your team's wellbeing. Without trust, no other principle matters.

5. Remember the Human Element In our process-driven world, it's easy to forget that humans have basic needs. Address sleep deprivation. Watch for burnout. Pay attention to the narratives people are telling themselves - aim for realistic optimism over both toxic positivity and despair.

Sometimes victory looks like a tiny boat setting off.

These principles sound simple. Implementing them under pressure is anything but. Yet they've proven their worth repeatedly, from Antarctic ice floes to earthquake-shattered cities to corporate crises.

The tangle - that state of complete disorientation and loss of reference points - isn't just something to survive. It's often where the most important work happens. Every truly interesting project, every meaningful innovation, every real change involves some journey through chaos.

Instead of avoiding these moments, the key is to develop tools to navigate through them. To recognize that when everything falls apart, we still have choices about how to move forward. To understand that even in our most technologically advanced projects, success ultimately comes down to human beings supporting each other through difficult territory.

And sometimes, that navigation looks like a small team in a tiny boat, aiming for a distant shore, choosing to move forward despite impossible odds.

Embracing the Navigator's Mind

The projects that matter most will always lead us into uncertain territory. Innovation requires it. Real change demands it. The question isn't whether we'll encounter the tangle, but how we'll navigate through it.

The temptation in our technological age is to believe we can process our way out of chaos. To think that with enough frameworks, enough documentation, enough carefully constructed procedures, we can avoid the messy human experience of disorientation and fear.

What I've learned from the messiest projects is almost the opposite. When reality breaks, we need to strip away complexity rather than add to it. To return to fundamental principles that can hold true even when everything else is uncertain. To remember that behind every project plan and process diagram are human beings trying to find their way through difficult territory.

Shackleton didn't save his men through elaborate strategies. He saved them by maintaining a clear goal, fostering deep trust, and keeping them moving forward when standing still meant death. His tools were simple. His implementation was masterful.

The same principles that guided his tiny boat through Antarctic waters can guide us through our modern challenges. Whether we're rebuilding cities, scaling companies, creating games, or investigating painful truths, the core challenge remains: how do we keep moving forward when the path ahead is unclear?

The answer lies not in avoiding chaos, but in developing the navigator's mind. In learning to read the territory rather than clinging to outdated maps. In building deep trust that can weather storms. In maintaining movement without losing direction.

The tangle will always be there, waiting at the edges of our ambition. Learning to navigate it might be the most important skill we can develop.

For those interested in diving deeper into crisis navigation and project recovery, I recommend starting with Alfred Lansing's "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage." Or check out www.manonfire.org to explore my services as a strategy and delivery specialist, and storytelling4leaders.com for leadership workshops.