ABC - Acting and Being in Chaos

During the last week, I had a somewhat unique experience, first viewing what was happening from afar to then being thrown into the midst of it.

I started my week out by coming back from visiting a desert in Colombia. That tranquil getaway and car ride back was followed by getting to Bogota and meeting people from all around the world trying to get back home. After conversations about the situation and scrolling through a now more than ever hectic Facebook-feed, I was coming to the same realization myself, that this was probably a really good idea. I ended up booking a flight, all the while hearing and seeing the problems that traveling at this time would entail with unforeseen cancellations, forced quarantines, and borders closing.

Before the disconnected visit to the desert, I was following what was happening in Europe and Asia from afar, with the illusion of safety, the carefree atmosphere, and abundance of time that traveling in Colombia for an extended period provided me with. I could see the whole affair with a quite detached and yet very caring perspective as my normal life, the ones I love, and my whole Facebook feed had to be more engaged since the problem was much closer to them, while I was here, being able to reflect and philosophize about it.

After coming back from the desert however, I was forced to act rather than just think. The situation quickly burst the bubble I had been in. I was meeting people that were crying for not knowing if they could get back. Others were angry at the whole situation and the airlines for canceling their flights. Some were hopeless for seeing that the flights were now so expensive that they couldn’t afford them to yet others preaching that everything would be alright, an attitude seemingly based on the fact that they already had their tickets and were leaving. I would soon come to be somewhere in between all of these myself.

To get home at this time meant calculating the various risks of getting infected and being a part of the problem myself, having to pay ridiculous amounts for flights not knowing if they were to be canceled or not and figuring out the best itinerary not to get stuck along the way based on the ever-changing news. All the while I had the chance of talking to all these other people as they were riding the same emotional and intellectual roller-coaster.

Acting in chaos, this is what nation’s and large companies have to do right now, and you as well if you are an important part in any of these or like me, just happen to find yourself trying to figure out how to travel across half the globe without getting infected or stuck. The first thing I would like to say about acting in chaos is that it is, and always will be hard. If someone says that they are good at it they have either not been through real chaos or they were lucky because there is no perfect system for it.

That being said, there are for sure better or worse systems for dealing with it, VUCA is a good one that is quite popular. VUCA is an acronym and stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. As VUCA is pretty much exchangeable for what I think Chaos stands for and is very much representative of where we find ourselves and our decisions in right now I used that.

Tip: To remember this word you can think of the good but really weird and kind of scary song named “My name is LUKA” by Suzanne Vega. Now think that she is singing “My name is VUCA”, because chaos/VUCA lives close to you, you have probably seen it before and it is also really weird and kind of scary.

And now that you will never forget that, conveniently a good way of handling VUCA is also named VUCA, Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility and sure, there are many other ways and systems to go about this as well, but to follow Suzanne's wise words, let us not argue any more about that.

Vision — Where do you want to go?

This is hugely important, because not knowing where to go or what it is you want to achieve, there is no way of getting there, to quote yet another book I have yet to read:

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice: “I don’t much care where.”

The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”

Me — Back to Sweden.

Understanding — What is the situation like?

This is done by taking in the situation based on different perspectives and sources. As much as this point is crucial it is also highly confusing and misleading in my view. Every single one of the words making up the non-solution part of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) is sort of anti-understandable in their very semantic nature. So equally if not more important than the understanding itself is understanding the “in-understanding” built into the whole situation. Understanding that the nature of chaos dictates that you won’t be able to understand everything and understanding that you still have to act from this.

Me — I looked at news, my Facebook-feed, emailed airlines, embassies and understood that the situation was shit, borders were closing, planes were cancelled, prices were crazy and that everything was changing fast.

Clarity — See what is most important.

Getting clarity is something very hard in these kinds of situations and the word “most” is essential to keep in mind!

Me — The overall trend is that the situation is going in a negative direction and that it is going fast. So I should act now based on the little knowledge I have because if I wait it will most likely get even worse.

An example of most important versus just important: I missed out on the *VERY* crucial fact that Turkey had stopped flights to Sweden since the 14th of March, and I booked my flights on the 16th. However, since the flights are not only the countries affairs but also the airlines I ended up getting on one of the last, if not the last flight going from Turkey to Sweden! While I will acknowledge I was extremely lucky in this and that I missed out on an important fact, I also acknowledge that had I waited to get more info and disregarded that the time was the most important, I might have missed out on getting back entirely.

Agility — Act fast and be ready to change the plan!

Things have to be done and to not act is also to act, as simple as that, kind of.

Learning by failure or inaction works in some situations such as tech startups but it can be devastating in others. So while actions have to be taken in order to combat the problems at hand, the ability to change the plan accordingly based on what we learn is also a key component of agility.

I would like to put in some other important meanings for A as well, these being Acceptance and Again:

Acceptance — You will not come to an optimal solution in chaos, to act at times like these sucks because taking action without having spent enough time in the prior steps will always end up missing on something which in retrospect will seem obvious. So you will hopefully make a good enough decision, but accept that it will not be perfect and that you still have to act while knowing this.

Again — Part of chaos is the change, so this is not a one time list where you check the steps of and get done but rather a list you iterate over, again and again, to get to the solution.

Me — I’ll book a plane ticket for tomorrow, I’ll review the situation continuously, talk with people as well as spend my time reading about the news for every layover I have, try re-booking or get new flights as needed and to keep reminding myself that whatever happens happens and that this situation is mostly out of my control.

Being in chaos, namely in the form of the COVID-19 at this time, is in my view mainly about Acceptance. You are being in chaos if you are quarantined from work or school, you are being in chaos if you are watching the news and reading or your Facebook-feed, to be honest, wherever you happen to find yourself at this moment, you are being in chaos. The main thing is to realize that there is most likely nothing you can do about what happens during this outbreak.

(EXCEPT WASHING YOUR HANDS AND STAYING AWAY FROM PEOPLE AS BEST AS YOU CAN, PLEASE DO THIS).

But the general situation at hand, the bad news, the stock market plummeting, the planes getting canceled and you not getting the money back, not being able to get home or you not being able to go on that trip you had planned, there is nothing you can do about these things, and if you get worried up about them, chances are it will most likely only make your situation even worse. Nietzsche, whose books I have yet to read and whose name I have yet to learn how to spell said it best in this phrase:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary — but love it.”

Realize that it is freaking hard to act in times like these, which I’ll get to, so Be humble and don’t complain. If you were the leader of a country or sat on the board of an airline, you too would fuck up right now. So please don’t go around complaining about how, in your opinion, people, companies or your own county is doing things wrong right now, because these are very hard times to do things right for anyone, and we still have no idea if a decision is bad or not since we are still in the middle of the whole thing.

Understand that It could be worse, yes, this might sound like a privileged or simple thing to say but hear me out. I could try telling you to feel sorry for me because I have lost a great amount of money on the market and having to buy several expensive last-minute flights. But you know what, it could always be way, way worse so don’t feel sorry for me. The Stoic philosophers practiced this in the form of what author William B. Irvine calls “Negative visualization”, by visualizing and trying to go into the mental state that you would be in if things were worse than they are, you will actually be grateful instead of feeling sorry for yourself and this holds true in almost any situation.

Now for a more hands-on and practical tip. If you are stuck at home reading this, Read history, read books like “Sapiens” or “Guns, Germs, and Steel” to give you the realization that these kinds of global shitstorms happen every now and then. 50 years ago we were mid-Cold War looking at the chance of world annihilation every day, 100 years ago we had the Spanish flu, so these were not easy times either. And if you want to look back even further, about 700 years ago people were dying like flies In the black plague and before that, o boy before that, life was most likely so shitty any normal day that you would not accept a ticket back there to skip Corona even if I gave you a million dollars for it. A great saying is:

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rimes”

So chances are, whatever is going down right now is most likely like something that has happened before with a new twist. For sure, this whole thing sucks, I agree, but for even more sure, these events will still keep on happening and maybe there is something we can learn by looking back at the previous versions of trouble that has crossed our path. Or if you are not as pretentious as I am in your reasoning why you do things, you can just do it to kill some time, either way, read history.

Closing thoughts, I want to emphasize what I said at the start of the action part again:

“The first thing I would like to say about acting in chaos is that it is, and always will be hard.”

This situation we are in at this moment is hard and terrible in many ways and I am by no means trying to say anything else. But being in this situation also provides us with the chance to do stuff we would normally not do, such as to write, to call our family and tell them that we love them, to illustrate all the important data about the virus in a new and smart way, to play that old computer game you miss playing, to meditate, to develop a chatbot in order to help alleviate the government or just to do nothing for a change.

P.S — I wrote most of this during my chaotic travel that lasted more than 50(!) hours and I did not really sleep too well in that time, so I just wanted to excuse my tired self if this whole thing ended up being confusing and not too well written, but it was a great way to kill some time!

P.P.S I also figured publishing it would be a great way to “Tame my Mammoth”, so that’s why you can read it.