Low diatribe

There's an innate drive in all life to rail against entropy — the natural tendency toward disorder, decay, and the eventual heat death of the universe. I feel this relentless pull toward disorder and have watched how things naturally drift toward chaos when left unattended. Teams fragment without conscious effort to hold them together. Communication breaks down. Processes decay. Shared understanding scatters like leaves in the wind.

It's not because people are lazy or don't care. It's because the universe itself tends toward randomness, and human systems are no exception. Every living thing fights this same fundamental battle — creating order from chaos, building complexity from simplicity, maintaining structure against forces that would tear it apart.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder in an isolated system always increases over time. But living systems aren't isolated. They're open systems that can maintain and even increase their organization by importing energy from their environment. A plant fights decay by capturing sunlight. A team fights fragmentation by investing energy in communication, alignment, and shared purpose.

I see this as the fundamental challenge to leadership — the conscious application of energy to create and maintain order in human systems. Not the rigid, authoritarian kind that crushes creativity, but the dynamic, adaptive kind that enables complex work to happen. The kind that creates clarity without stifling emergence, structure without sacrificing flexibility.

I learned this leading a distributed team across multiple time zones. Without constant attention to communication patterns, shared context, and cultural alignment, the team would naturally drift apart. People would start working in isolation, making assumptions that weren't shared, solving problems that others had already solved. The pull toward disorder was subtle but relentless.

The solution wasn't more meetings or stricter processes — it was more intentional energy investment in the things that create coherence. Regular check-ins that weren't just status updates but genuine connection points. Documentation that captured not just what we decided but why we decided it. Rituals that reinforced shared values and created opportunities for serendipitous collaboration.

This work is never finished because the pull toward disorder never stops. The moment you stop investing energy in organizational health, decay begins. The communication channels that worked last month need refreshing. The processes that created clarity last quarter need updating. The culture that felt strong last year needs renewal.

But here's what I find beautiful about this — the fight against disorder is what gives work meaning. When we create something valuable — a product, a team, a culture, a relationship — we're participating in the universe's most fundamental creative act. We're taking the raw materials of human potential and organizing them into something greater than the sum of their parts.

This is why maintenance work matters as much as innovation. The leader who only wants to build new things but won't invest in sustaining existing systems will watch everything they create slowly fall apart. The team that only focuses on shipping features but ignores technical debt will eventually be crushed by the accumulated disorder in their codebase.

I think about this pull toward chaos when I'm deciding how to spend my time and energy. Every choice is an investment in order or an acceptance of decay. The difficult conversation I avoid today will require more energy to address tomorrow. The process improvement I postpone will cost more to implement later. The relationship I neglect will require more effort to repair than to maintain.

I've learned that the leaders who last understand this rhythm. But more personally, I've learned it from my own relationship with disorder. I will confess to being a surface abuser — any open space in my office accumulates loosely stacked piles of papers, books, and LEGO sets in various states of assembly. It's my "nature." If I make a grand gesture and clean up the entire space but change nothing else, the piles return as soon as I turn my back. The only way to fight the chaos is to adjust my tendencies — small, iterative changes to how I handle each piece of paper, each book, each decision about where things go.

The same principle applies to organizational health. Leaders invest energy consistently in the foundational elements: clear communication, shared purpose, mutual trust, and adaptive capacity. They don't wait for crisis to force attention to these fundamentals. They treat disorder resistance as an ongoing practice of small adjustments, not a one-time reorganization project.

There's something deeply satisfying about this work. When you help a team find its rhythm, when you create processes that actually serve people, when you build culture that enables everyone to do their best work — you're participating in the universe's creative impulse. You're adding to the sum total of order, meaning, and possibility in the world.

The pull toward disorder will always be there, patient and persistent, waiting to reclaim whatever order we've created. But that's not a reason for despair — it's a reason for purpose. Every day we get to choose — will we add to the chaos or contribute to the coherence? Will we let things fall apart or invest the energy to hold them together?

In the end, consciousness itself might be the universe's way of fighting disorder. We are the cosmos becoming aware of itself, organizing itself, creating meaning from meaninglessness. Every act of leadership, every moment of care, every effort to build something better is part of that larger story.

The pull toward chaos is real, but so is our capacity to resist it. And in that resistance, we find not just survival, but purpose.