You’ve surely heard these common phrases in the life of a team or executive committee: “We need to plan better”, “Let’s get things in order”, “We need to structure all this”. These mantras circulate quietly in executive committees, between two dashboards, with the conviction that a little tightening will be enough to solve problems that are fundamentally human, contextual, and changing.
This is a subject that interests me all the more because I have made it my specialty. Finally, it’s not about tightening the screws “the old-fashioned way,” but about providing a framework while acknowledging that control is largely an illusion.
Henry Mintzberg also has a very strong opinion on the subject, and his voice naturally carries further than mine.
Managing is not planning, organizing, or coordinating—which are all just words for controlling. It’s “calculated chaos and controlled disorder”.
In other words, managing is not about fitting reality into an Excel spreadsheet. It means accepting that reality always goes beyond the framework and that competence is less about control than about navigation.
This idea, which was provocative twenty years ago, is now obvious, and yet we see little change in the way the role of a manager is perceived in businesses and in job descriptions, perhaps more so in France than elsewhere (France sick of its management). In a hybrid world of work, where tools proliferate faster than their uses evolve, where processes pile up, and where innovation is expected but stifled, managers who still seek to control everything become the primary source of inertia.
It is through this lens that we will revisit some of the concepts I regularly explore here.
In short:
- Management cannot be reduced to traditional functions such as planning, organizing, or controlling. Rather, it consists of navigating an uncertain environment, constantly adjusting to reality.
- Henry Mintzberg advocates a vision of management as a contextual and artisanal practice, as opposed to a technocratic approach based on control.
- Hybrid work, the multiplicity of tools, and the complexity of contexts require flexible coordination based on adaptation and the ability to make diverse practices coexist.
- Innovation arises from emergence and the unexpected, and the role of the manager is to foster this creative ecosystem rather than impose a rigid framework.
- A people-centered organization values autonomy, the adjustment of rules to reality, and makes the manager a facilitator rather than a supervisor.
The author
Henry Mintzberg is a leading critic of traditional management thinking.
A professor at McGill University in Montreal, he is known for his empirical approach to management, which focuses on the reality of managers’ work. Rather than reducing it to a set of abstract functions such as planning, organizing, and controlling, Mintzberg sees management as a profession involving constant adjustments, decisions made in context, and trade-offs between conflicting interests. It is more of a craft than a science.
Context of the quote
In this quote, Mintzberg deconstructs the technocratic view of management. He attacks the favorite verbs of traditional organizations (plan, organize, coordinate) and reduces them to a single logic: control. In contrast, he proposes another interpretation: that of management as a situated activity, rooted in reality, which consists less in controlling disorder than in making something of it. “Calculated chaos,” “controlled disorder”: the oxymoron is not intended to provoke thought but to describe reality.
Explanation and implications
This formulation highlights the often-observed paradox that what makes management effective is not its ability to organize the world, but to deal intelligently with disorder. Rigid control, standardized behavior, and overplanning are all reflexes that provide reassurance but fail as soon as the context becomes fluid, which is the norm today.
This implies a change in attitude: abandoning the illusion of total control in favor of a form of flexible, adaptive, and embodied regulation (How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams?). Managers are no longer architects of order, but directors of human dynamics, capable of creating the conditions for coordinated action without stifling autonomy.
Perspective
a) The hybridization of work/places/tools: orchestrating disorder
In hybrid work environments, the myth of perfect organization no longer exists. Or rather, it is a context where we can no longer pretend to lie to ourselves and claim that it exists. Employees no longer operate in a single space-time, but in a variety of contexts, tools, and rhythms. Coordination can no longer rely on rigid structures but must emerge from an ability to organize disorder.
This is where the Chief of Work or a similar role comes into play (Do we need a chief of work?) and can be useful if they have the right guidelines. Their role is not to impose a universal solution, but to enable practices that are compatible with each other and maintain a minimum level of consistency. They structure without freezing, provide a framework without constraining, and put the individual back at the center of work design.
b) Innovation is about emergence, not execution
Innovation does not follow a linear plan but is the result of a series of trials, detours, and failures. It is organized chaos where uncertainty is a resource, not an obstacle, and trying to confine it within a rigid procedural framework is tantamount to sterilizing it.
In this sense, an innovative manager is a gardener, not an engineer. They prepare fertile ground, create conditions for fruitful interactions, and encourage unexpected collisions between people and ideas. They accept that they cannot control everything in order to better capture what emerges. Chaos is effectively “calculated” because it is channeled toward possible, but never guaranteed, forms of value.
c) People-Centric Operations: structuring around people
People-Centric Operations (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers ) start from human realities and the reality of work to design operational structures. It is not about innovating for the sake of innovation, but about making organizations smarter, more efficient, and, above all, allowing skills to flourish in a supportive environment that does not stifle them (Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work).
This means recognizing that rigid processes do not stand up well to real complexity (Show me a completely smooth process and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes, real boats rock. (Frank Herbert)). Putting people back at the center of systems means giving teams back the ability to take ownership of rules, adjust them, and question them. This is very much in line with Mintzberg’s thinking: managers become facilitators of practices, not guardians of a theoretical model.
This is why I am surprised, especially in the context of the arrival of AI, to read that the manager of the future will have to rely primarily on technical expertise, when it seems to me that the opposite is true (The minimalist manager: a promising model, but one that needs clarification). Moreover, in a world where some businesses are merging IT and HR to let machines orchestrate the work, I wonder what will be left for managers if they do not rise above the system (HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI).
Series enthusiasts may also think of Ted Lasso, who refuses to be at the center of decisions and believes that being the center of attention is a failure for a manager (The fictional interview with Ted Lasso, the manager who manages without expertise).
Managers are part of the system, but they also have the power to change it completely or partially, and that is all that matters because it is the real factor in performance, more than all the incantations and injunctions (You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. (James Clear)).
Bottom line
By summarizing management as a form of chaos regulation, Mintzberg invites us to rethink our organizational beliefs. It is no longer a question of seeking an ideal order, but of producing meaning and coordination in an uncertain, heterogeneous, and changing world.
Far from being an admission of weakness, this stance is a prerequisite for resilience: only structures capable of accommodating a certain amount of disorder can endure and adapt.
In a hybrid, innovative, and humanly complex world, controlled disorder is not an anomaly but almost a strategy.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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Considering the gap between management 2.0 and enterprise 2.0
France sick of its management
People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers
How to link formal and informal within the enterprise : the “still” company
50 years ago, the Marseille speech. And since then? Not much.
