You can’t get order for free — what do you do to balance order and chaos in your life or organisation?

Too great a focus on stability means you lose control entirely. (Queen Elizabeth II kept an incredible degree of continuity in royal institutions throughout her life — but the inability to adapt to the mood around Diana’s death threatened a huge wave of change).

Too much adaptation means that whatever is continuing is unrecognisable (Elon Musk paid £44bn for Twitter against his will, has alienated heavy users and advertisers, and now killed off the brand).

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So, in life, you face a series of choices:

- continuity whatever the price, until you’re washed away by the rains as you fail to bend (King Louis XVI of France, who clung to the absolute monarchy even as the French Revolution was sweeping the country)

- adapting but losing all identity (Nokia worked across many industries before dominating mobile phones for 14 years, then lost its consumer-facing identity entirely)

- building robust buffers, within which life can continue peacefully (we humans use technology from heating and cooling our homes to food storage and preservation, and water treatment — as long as our feedback loops with the environment stay under control!)

- focusing on adaptation and fast-cycle learning (Netflix moved from DVDs-by-post to streaming to production — we will see what happens next)

Or you can create a garden — zones with strictly defined areas of certainty and uncertainty — enough chaos in the order and enough order in the chaos. Pixar blends ‘Brain Trusts’ reviewing films in development, adding new ideas and more chaos and creativity, even as they use a highly regimented and technical production process to complete films.

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You can go barefoot into the world, you can try to pave over the entire world around you, or you can carry your own portable paving, strapped to your feet… like a kind of shoe. You can be a snail, a hare, or a nest-building bird.

Which are you? Which is your organisation?