Diagnosing the Chaos That’s Holding You Back
Every leader knows what chaos feels like—missed deadlines, miscommunication, the same issues resurfacing despite best efforts. Diagnosing the source of that chaos? That’s a different story.
Chaos isn’t always loud. Sometimes it hides behind over-polished dashboards or under tightly run meetings where no one speaks up. It masquerades as urgency, agility, or even innovation. But underneath, it’s draining your team’s energy, breaking trust, and slowing everything down.
In my work with organizations of all shapes and sizes, I’ve found that internal chaos isn’t random. It follows predictable patterns. And once you know what to look for, you can stop chasing symptoms and start solving root causes.
That’s why I created the 4 Conditions of Chaos Matrix—a simple but powerful tool to help leaders recognize the signals of misalignment, misincentivization, avoidance, and impulsivity inside their organizations. These four conditions don’t just describe chaos; they help you diagnose it.
But even with the right framework, there’s another challenge: information rarely flows cleanly to the top.
It’s human nature to want to shield senior leaders from problems. No one wants to be the one who escalates a tough issue, especially when it feels like you’re supposed to have already solved it. So issues linger. People troubleshoot and work around it, hoping it won’t need to go higher. The result? Executives in the so-called “ivory tower” are often the last to know what’s going wrong—until it’s pretty destructive.
This is the paradox of executive leadership. From the top, you have the clearest view of the full organization and the greatest access to context. That makes you best positioned to solve the most complex problems. But you may not even know those problems exist until the chaos has spread.
And when issues finally do reach your level, they’re often tangled up in frustration, confusion, and conflicting stories from every layer of the org.
This post is about breaking that pattern.
We’ll explore how each of the four conditions of chaos shows up, how to spot them early, and what it means when pain finally makes it to the top. Most importantly, we’ll talk about how to empower your teams without leaving them to solve problems in isolation—and how to respond quickly and strategically when chaos does show up at your door.
Because chaos will happen, diagnosing it early—and responding with clarity—can turn it from an existential threat into a solvable challenge.
The Ivory Tower Dilemma
Let’s talk about the “ivory tower.” It’s a metaphor that gets thrown around often—and not always kindly. In organizations, it usually refers to executives and senior leaders perceived as out of touch with day-to-day realities. But here’s the truth: the ivory tower exists for a reason. And it’s not all bad.
The higher you go in leadership, the more context you hold. You see how decisions in one department ripple through the rest of the organization. You’re aware of budget constraints, long-term strategies, legal considerations, political dynamics, and other invisible variables that most employees never have access to. That broader view is essential—it allows you to make decisions that serve the entire organization, not just one piece.
But that elevation comes at a cost.
The farther removed you are from the front lines, the harder it is to spot small cracks before they become major structural problems. And it’s not just distance—it’s human nature. People don’t love escalating issues to the top. They worry it will make them look bad, get someone else in trouble, or add to a leader’s overflowing plate. So instead of speaking up, they try to solve the problem themselves.
On the surface, that might sound like empowerment. Isn’t it good for people to take initiative and figure things out? Absolutely—but only when they have the right information to do it well. And that’s where the real problem starts.
When lower-level employees or mid-level managers troubleshoot in isolation—without the full organizational context—you often end up with well-intentioned decisions that unintentionally create misalignment, confusion, or new problems elsewhere. One team adds a new process to fix a bottleneck, not realizing it conflicts with another department’s timeline. A manager reallocates resources to hit a quarterly goal, inadvertently sabotaging a long-term strategic initiative.
These decisions are made with good intentions—but limited visibility. And over time, they create a patchwork of local fixes that don’t fit together. That’s chaos in the making.
Meanwhile, up in the ivory tower, things may look stable. Until one day, the pain spills over. Suddenly, a fire that’s been smoldering quietly erupts into a full-blown crisis. And because you weren’t looped in earlier, it takes longer—and costs more—to unravel the damage.
This disconnect doesn’t mean your team is broken. It means your system for information flow is. You can’t fix what you can’t see. And you can’t expect people to make aligned decisions if they don’t have access to the big picture.
That’s the ivory tower dilemma in a nutshell:
- Benefit: Executives hold the highest-level context and strategic insight
- Drawback: Issues are often hidden or delayed in making their way up the chain
- Result: Pain points that reach the top are already complex, deeply rooted, and often affecting multiple layers of the organization
This isn’t a reason to step down from the tower—it’s a call to re-engineer how information travels up and down the organization.
You want empowered teams who solve problems early and locally—but you also want those teams making decisions with the right strategic frame. And when something does make its way to your level, it should be treated like an organizational red flag: If it reached the ivory tower, it’s already serious.
The key isn’t disempowering your people. It’s giving them as much context as possible so that they can solve problems well, creating a culture where escalating real pain is seen as smart, not weak.
Introducing the 4 Conditions of Chaos Matrix
In a previous post, we explored the Chaos to Clarity Matrix. This tool helps leaders assess how their organization is functioning based on two critical variables: clarity and consistency of action. When both are high, your organization is in a state of flow—strategic, aligned, and effective. When either drops, you risk slipping into the Hamster Wheel (high action, low clarity) or Missed Opportunities (high clarity, low action). But when both clarity and consistency are low, you’re in what I call Total Chaos.
You can check out that blog post here.
If the Chaos to Clarity Matrix tells us where we are, the 4 Conditions of Chaos Matrix explains why we’re there.
Wherever chaos is present, it’s usually not due to incompetence or bad intentions. Most organizational chaos results from good people trying to do good work—without shared context, coordination, or clarity. That’s where this framework comes in.
The 4 Conditions of Chaos Matrix breaks down the root causes of internal chaos into four overlapping categories:
- Misalignment
- Misincentivization
- Avoidance
- Impulsivity
These four conditions can exist independently, but more often than not, they feed off one another. When they combine, they create confusion, frustration, and exhaustion across your organization.
Let’s break each one down:
1. Misalignment
This is the most common and most invisible form of chaos. Teams, departments, or leaders work at cross purposes—often without realizing it. Everyone thinks they’re moving the organization forward, but they’re pulling in different directions.
What it looks like:
- Competing priorities between teams
- Goals that don’t ladder up to a clear strategy
- Constant backtracking or rework due to unclear direction
Misalignment is especially dangerous because it’s often interpreted as poor performance or low engagement, when people are simply working toward different visions of success.
2. Misincentivization
When what’s rewarded doesn’t match what’s needed, dysfunction becomes normalized. People game the system—not maliciously, but because that’s how they’re measured. It becomes easier to optimize for what’s easy to track, rather than what matters.
What it looks like:
- Short-term wins are celebrated while long-term goals languish
- Metrics that drive counterproductive behavior
- High performers are leaving because they feel undervalued
Misincentivization creates a brittle culture where doing the right thing might penalize you, and doing the “measurable” thing gets you promoted.
3. Avoidance
Nobody likes conflict. But when feedback is dodged, hard truths are softened, or pain is ignored, problems grow in the shadows. This condition erodes trust, accountability, and momentum over time.
What it looks like:
- Teams staying silent in meetings
- Leadership is unaware of festering issues
- Persistent performance problems with no clear resolution
Avoidance isn’t always passive. Sometimes it shows up as positivity culture or “just get it done” attitudes that actively suppress dissent. Either way, it’s dangerous.
4. Impulsivity
Some chaos looks like speed. Teams are busy, ideas are flowing, pivots are constant—but nothing sticks. There’s a rush to action without a clear why, and no time to reflect on what’s working.
What it looks like:
- Strategic plans that change every quarter
- Projects launched before previous ones are finished
- Employees constantly shifting gears and burning out
Impulsivity thrives in environments where chaos is normalized. It’s mistaken for agility, but it’s really just reactive behavior masquerading as innovation.
Any of these conditions can drag an organization into the Hamster Wheel or Missed Opportunities quadrants of the Chaos to Clarity Matrix. But when multiple conditions are at play—especially without visibility from the top—you’re likely already in Total Chaos.
And here’s the kicker: none of these conditions start in the ivory tower. They begin at the team level, project level, or department level—places where people are trying to solve problems in isolation, often without access to the bigger picture. That’s why understanding and diagnosing these patterns is essential for executive leadership.
Diagnosing Chaos Through Pain Points
Organizational chaos doesn’t usually show up with sirens and flashing lights. It shows up in quieter, more familiar ways: delayed decisions, duplicate work, vague performance reviews, or high-performing people quietly burning out. These are pain points—and they are diagnostic gold if you know how to read them.
Pain points tell the truth before dashboards do.
But those signals don’t always reach you when you’re sitting in the executive suite. People filter. They solve problems locally. They hope it won’t need to escalate. And while that instinct makes sense, it can delay the identification of larger patterns—until it’s too late.
This is where the Four Conditions of Chaos Matrix becomes a practical tool. If the Chaos to Clarity Matrix helps you understand how chaotic your organization feels (low clarity + low consistency = Total Chaos), the Four Conditions help you pinpoint why the chaos exists in the first place.
Each matrix quadrant corresponds to a specific underlying dynamic that generates pain. Below, we’ll explore how these show up not just in processes, but in your people’s real, lived experiences.
Misalignment: The Pain of Disconnection
Misalignment isn’t about laziness or resistance—it’s about people working hard on things that don’t move the organization forward. Everyone’s busy, but progress is elusive because the effort isn’t aligned.
What it sounds like:
- “I’m not sure how what I do every day contributes to the organization’s overall success.”
- “Everyone on the team is a high performer, but we aren’t moving the needle on our strategic goals.”
This is the pain of being productive but not effective. It’s not just frustrating—it’s disorienting. People want to know their work matters. Engagement quietly erodes when there’s no visible through-line from their effort to the organization’s impact.
What it causes:
- Strategic goals that never seem to get traction
- Departments working at cross purposes
- Decision fatigue and duplicate efforts
- High activity, low forward movement
Misincentivization: The Pain of Competing Signals
In organizations experiencing misincentivization, people are told one thing but rewarded for another. This disconnect creates distrust, confusion, and ultimately, disengagement—especially among your most values-driven contributors.
What it sounds like:
- “It’s nearly impossible for me to achieve top performance marks because of the crazy metrics.”
- “What leadership says they want from us and the behavior they’re getting based on the metrics aren’t just different—they’re diametrically opposed.”
This is the pain of being caught between what’s right and what’s rewarded. It creates a quiet but corrosive tension. People either conform to the metric (and feel disingenuous), or they follow their values (and feel penalized).
What it causes:
- Manipulation of metrics or performance systems
- Short-term wins prioritized over long-term strategy
- Silo behavior and internal competition
- Loss of trust in leadership
Avoidance: The Pain of Silence and Stagnation
Avoidance is often mistaken for harmony. On the surface, everything looks fine—no complaints, few escalations, steady performance. But beneath that calm exterior, resentment and frustration build.
What it sounds like:
- “I’m told I’m a superstar, but I’m getting the same ratings and bonus as the team slacker. Why do I bother?”
- “I just got passed over for another promotion or lateral move because I’m ‘too valuable’ in my current position. I don’t feel valued.”
This is the pain of unspoken disappointment. People feel stuck, unseen, and underutilized. And because no one is directly addressing the issue, nothing changes. Eventually, top performers either disengage—or leave.
What it causes:
- Stalled careers and hidden attrition risk
- Passive-aggressive behavior and politicking
- Reward systems that lack credibility
- Quiet quitting or emotional burnout
Impulsivity: The Pain of Constant Shifting
Impulsivity doesn’t always feel chaotic at first. It can feel fast-paced, energetic, even exciting. But beneath that hustle is a lack of follow-through and a constant sense of being yanked off course. Over time, it exhausts your people.
What it sounds like:
- “I just spent weeks putting together this deliverable, and now my supervisor told me it’s no longer relevant.”
- “My supervisor just threw me and my project under the bus—the one HE directed me to do—when senior leaders questioned the reason for the project.”
This is the pain of instability. Of wasted effort. Of losing credibility with your team because priorities change too quickly—or no one will take ownership of the changes. The most damaging part? People stop investing in their work because they assume it’ll be scrapped anyway.
What it causes:
- Project fatigue and disengagement
- Loss of psychological safety
- Cynicism and learned helplessness
- Execution without reflection or learning
Seeing the Patterns Beneath the Pain
Each of these pain points is a signal. And if you listen closely, they form patterns that tell you where your systems, leadership behaviors, and communication practices are out of sync.
These quotes don’t come from difficult employees—they come from frustrated, capable people trying to do meaningful work in systems that aren’t supporting them. When those quotes start to pile up, chaos isn’t on the horizon—it’s already here.
But again, here’s the dilemma: most of this pain doesn’t make it to the executive level in its raw form.
Instead, you hear the polished version:
- “Morale seems a little low.”
- “There’s some tension between teams.”
- “We’re getting questions about priorities.”
By the time it gets to you, the pain has already been filtered, diluted, and wrapped in careful language.
That’s why having a framework like the Four Conditions of Chaos is so important. It allows you to cut through the surface symptoms and ask better questions. You’re not just fixing problems—you’re diagnosing the underlying dynamics that keep recreating them.
What Reaches the Ivory Tower (and What Doesn’t)
As an executive, you have the greatest access to context—the full organizational picture, the competing priorities, the long-term vision, the political landscape. You are, in many ways, the only person positioned to make strategic trade-offs across departments, roles, and time horizons. But despite all this visibility, the pain of chaos tends to reach you late, if at all.
And by the time it does, it’s already causing damage.
This disconnect is not because your people are hiding things maliciously. It’s because the instinct to protect leadership from problems runs deep. Teams try to fix issues themselves. Managers filter before they escalate. Employees assume leadership already knows—or that bringing up “small stuff” will be seen as complaining.
And when they do escalate something, it’s often sanitized, wrapped in professional language, and stripped of the emotional urgency that would help you understand the stakes.
You don’t hear: “I’ve stopped caring because no one notices my effort.” You hear: “Team morale seems a little off.”
You don’t hear: “My work is irrelevant and my supervisor just abandoned me.” You hear: “There’s some misalignment in how priorities are communicated.”
So here’s the critical insight: if a pain point has made its way up to the ivory tower, it’s no longer a minor issue. It has already passed through multiple filters, resisted multiple local fixes, and persisted long enough to be seen as systemic. And even then, you’re often only seeing part of it.
This is why many executives feel like the house was “suddenly” on fire—when in reality, the smoke was building for months. You just weren’t in the room where the fire started.
If your teams are operating with Low clarity and Low consistency of action, then you are already in a state of Total Chaos.
But from your vantage point, things might still look stable. Meetings are happening. Reports are turned in. Projects are in motion. And because you’re getting updates from people who are trying to hold it all together, you may not realize just how much friction they’re managing on a daily basis.
What you’re seeing is only the surface of the system. Beneath that surface, chaos often looks like:
- Brilliant people unsure how their work connects to strategy (misalignment)
- High performers questioning their worth because incentives don’t match expectations (misincentivization)
- Team members quietly disengaging because feedback loops are broken (avoidance)
- Constant course corrections driven by optics or fear rather than purpose (impulsivity)
And here’s the cost of this disconnect: while you’re assuming people are executing on your vision, they’re often problem-solving locally, without the strategic context you’re holding.
That means solutions are being developed in silos, sometimes unintentionally creating new forms of chaos even as they attempt to solve existing ones. An individual contributor adjusts a workflow to fix a bottleneck—only to introduce a compliance risk. A team shifts a deadline to improve output—but now they’ve derailed a cross-functional milestone.
This isn’t a failure of initiative. It’s a failure of context sharing.
So What Do You Do When Pain Reaches You?
First, recognize that pain rising to the ivory tower isn’t a nuisance—it’s a strategic alarm bell. It’s not a signal to push it back down or delegate it away—it’s a cue to lean in.
Here’s how:
- Validate, don’t deflect.
If someone is bringing a pain point to you, assume it took effort and courage to do so. Validate the input, even if the data feels incomplete or the emotion is high. - Zoom out.
Ask: Where else might this same pain be showing up? What system or incentive could be producing this pattern? Which of the Four Conditions does this pain reflect? - Zoom in.
What does this individual or team need to feel seen, supported, and empowered? How can you share context that helps them make aligned decisions moving forward? - Act swiftly and visibly.
Silence or delay sends a message—either “this pain isn’t real,” or “leadership doesn’t care.” Even small, visible moves to address the issue can rebuild trust and clarity. - Create space for upward signals.
You can’t act on what you don’t know. Build intentional feedback loops, anonymous pulse checks, reverse mentoring, or regular “pain point briefings” that make it safe—and expected—for insight to travel up, not just down.
This is Your Leverage Point
When pain hits the ivory tower, you have a choice.
You can treat it as noise, or as the vital signal it is. You can focus on containing the chaos—or you can use it as a doorway into deeper clarity and organizational health.
Because pain that reaches the top isn’t just a complaint—it’s a clue. It’s telling you exactly where to look to prevent the next fire.
Empowering Context-Driven Problem Solving
Here’s the good news: the solution is not to centralize every decision or pull authority away from your teams. The answer isn’t more approvals or more control.
The answer is more context.
Because empowered problem solving isn’t the problem. Disempowered problem solving—done in isolation, with partial or outdated context—is.
Your goal as an executive isn’t to micromanage every decision. It’s to build an environment where:
- Your people know what matters,
- Understand why it matters,
- And feel trusted to act in alignment with those goals.
That’s not just a cultural aspiration. It’s a strategic imperative in today’s fast-moving, complex operating environments.
Let’s look at how to build that kind of environment.
1. Share Strategic Context Relentlessly
You may feel like you’ve already communicated the vision. You probably have—once, maybe twice, during a town hall or all-hands. But your people are bombarded with noise. Without reinforcement, even the clearest message fades into background static.
Instead, treat context as an ongoing practice:
- Use real examples to explain how priorities are set and trade-offs are made.
- Reinforce how individual work ladders up to strategic goals.
- Share what you’re hearing at the top and what’s coming down the road—even when it’s uncertain.
The more your people understand the bigger picture, the better their day-to-day decisions will be. They won’t have to guess whether to prioritize speed or quality. They’ll know. And they’ll trust that their decisions align with where the organization is truly headed.
2. Make Escalation Safe, Not Shameful
If you want issues to surface early—before they become chaos—you need to remove the stigma around escalation. That doesn’t mean you want every small problem elevated. It means you create clear guidelines and safe pathways for people to say:
“Here’s a decision I’m not equipped to make with the information I have.”
Or:
“We’ve tried to solve this three different ways. It’s a bigger issue than we realized.”
Instead of asking, “Why didn’t someone fix this sooner?” ask, “What information or structure was missing that made this hard to resolve at the right level?”
That shift changes escalation from a sign of failure to a sign of system health. It helps you catch misalignment before it spreads. And it reinforces that your role isn’t just to set direction—it’s to remove friction.
3. Identify and Elevate Pain Proactively
You don’t need to wait for chaos to knock on your door. You can invite early signals by building in mechanisms to surface pain before it festers.
A few ways to do this:
- Create a recurring “pain point” round-up: a 15-minute standing agenda item where managers share friction they’re seeing in real time.
- Conduct brief skip-level check-ins or anonymous micro-surveys with open-ended prompts like: What’s slowing you down right now? or What’s one thing you’d fix if you had the authority?
- Encourage storytelling. Data can hide pain—stories reveal it. Look for patterns not just in metrics, but in how people describe their experience.
Remember, what feels like a “people issue” is often a signal of one of the Four Conditions of Chaos at play. The more you can name those conditions, the more effectively you can intervene.
4. Model Strategic Responsiveness
You don’t have to fix everything personally—but how you respond to pain matters. When someone brings forward a difficult issue and your response is slow, vague, or defensive, the message is clear: don’t bring problems here.
But when your response is grounded, direct, and transparent, you send a different signal: We solve problems here—together.
That doesn’t mean making rash decisions or changing course based on one conversation. It means:
- Acknowledging pain when you see it.
- Explaining what happens next.
- Closing the loop after decisions are made.
This builds credibility. It teaches your team how to think, not just what to do. And it reinforces that chaos isn’t a personal failure—it’s a shared challenge that gets solved through shared context.
5. Build Structures That Outlast Heroics
If your organization only functions because of heroic effort at the individual level, you don’t have a sustainable system—you have chaos with good PR.
Your long-term goal is to create systems that:
- Align action with strategy, not personality
- Reinforce clarity even when leadership changes
- Allow for flexibility without creating impulsivity
That means investing in things like:
- Role clarity and cross-functional planning
- Transparent prioritization processes
- Incentives that match desired behaviors
- Feedback loops that operate vertically and horizontally
When those systems are in place, your people don’t have to guess or improvise their way through ambiguity. They know how to move—and when to raise their hand.
It’s Not About Control. It’s About Connection.
Solving chaos doesn’t mean stopping people from acting—it means helping them act on purpose. That only happens when context flows freely, incentives align with impact, and pain is seen as a prompt for progress—not a problem to hide.
From Chaos to Clarity Starts With a Single Conversation
Chaos in organizations doesn’t usually start with a bad decision. It starts with disconnected decisions—ones made with good intentions, but without shared context. It starts when pain is normalized, when friction is absorbed instead of addressed, when people stop raising their hands because they assume no one’s listening—or that nothing will change.
And from the executive level, it’s easy to miss just how deep that pain runs until it reaches your desk wrapped in urgency.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You now have the language to name what you’re seeing—misalignment, misincentivization, avoidance, impulsivity—and a framework to identify the subtle, systemic patterns driving chaos. You understand how pain points reflect deeper dysfunctions, and how those conditions pull your organization away from the clarity and consistency required for flow.
Most importantly, you know the solution isn’t pulling decision-making back to the top. It’s about ensuring everyone—from your senior leaders to your frontline teams—has the clarity and context they need to solve problems in alignment with your strategy.
That shift starts with a conversation.
If this post has you nodding along or thinking, “I’ve seen these patterns in my organization,” let’s talk. I offer a rapid Organizational Chaos Diagnostic that helps you spot exactly where friction is showing up, why it’s happening, and what to do next. It’s not a generic assessment—it’s a tailored conversation that brings clarity to the chaos you’re feeling and sets the stage for meaningful change.
Or, if you’re craving time to reset, recharge, and think strategically alongside other executives who get it, join me for one of my Executive VIP Days. We’ll spend the morning creating space for you to refocus on what matters most, clear the mental clutter, and learn how to reduce chaos at the root.
Our next event is in Denver this May, with more cities to follow.
So here’s your invitation:
- If chaos is slowing you down, clouding your strategy, or draining your team—don’t ignore the pain.
- If you want help naming what’s really going on—raise your hand.
- If you’re ready to lead with clarity and build an organization where people solve problems with confidence—reach out.
Let’s turn chaos into momentum—together.
Email me directly at mary@evolveyourperformance.com and tell me how I can help.
