I like plans and planning. Business plans, contingency plans, and succession plans are all good things—until they aren’t. The very same plans that once brought order, continuity, and control have morphed into rigid obstacles to progress and innovation.

Both individuals and companies do it:  people become so bound to their plan that they lose sight of the big picture and fail, or worse, miss a fantastic opportunity. Businesses become so mired in the, “that’s-how-we’ve-always-done-it” mindset that the market passes them by, their products or processes become obsolete (think Borders Books, DEC, or Montgomery Ward), and they go out of business.

A few years ago I participated on the inaugural steering committee for a new community conference that had the goal of becoming an annual event. The first event was a roaring success, so was the second. The third not so much.

One of original steering committee members who had stayed the course (I dropped out after the first crazy, fun, rewarding but super time-eating year) shared her diagnosis as to why the third event was unsuccessful, “We relied on the plan too much. No one wanted the chaos we had the first year. But because we stuck to the plan, we missed out on including some excellent panelists and speakers. People we learned about after the selection process was finished. No one wanted to step outside the lines and do something different.”

The Power of Purposeful Discomfort

By virtue of conditioning, training, or preference, people often fall into one of two mental traps:  that without control there’s chaos or that too much control stifles creativity. Both viewpoints have merit. However, bad outcomes arise when we believe we must select between these two extremes:  that either it’s control or it’s chaos.

If our goal is progress and innovation, the trade-off for achieving that goal is accepting and managing the creative tension produced by having both chaos and control. They’re “equally important but essentially different” as Peter Drucker says. Disorder and boundaries are interdependent but contradictory elements necessary for success over time.

If we’re a control freak, we naturally want to resolve contradictions and create order. It feels better. It’s tidier. However, if we love having a blank slate, plans feel confining, too arbitrary. But picking sides in a paradox where both elements are needed for the best outcome is a recipe for personal and professional failure.

3 Ways to Harness the Power of Serendipity

So, how do effective leaders lead themselves and others in a creative dance where the partners are chaos and control?

They:

1) Know where they’re going, what they want to accomplish, and have a plan for getting there. There’s a timeline. Roles, responsibilities, and measures of success are defined. There’s also a willingness to flex or scrap it all and re-invent.

2)  Get comfortable being slightly uncomfortable. They recognize that always sticking to the plan without fail provides a false sense of security that blinds them to new opportunities. They’ve learned to be flexible with “how” the “what” is implemented and are also willing to challenge their thinking about the end goal. They embrace and reward purposeful discomfort.

3)  Leave room for serendipity. Whether that “interaction with an unintended outcome” (Scott Doorley, Stanford) or moment of aha realization is engineered by an app or spontaneous stroke of fate, they’re open and receptive to the mad genius possibilities it presents. They don’t let existing plans be straitjackets.

“Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.” ~Lawrence Block

Embracing the power of serendipity so we can dance with both control and chaos requires a willingness to be vulnerable and sometimes not be certain of the next step. That kind of discomfort is a good thing.

Have how you learned to dance with both stability and innovation? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.