The rainy and strong wind warning came while I was mid-sentence in a school play rehearsal. Not a drill — a real one. Within the hour, our little island school in the Seychelles had transformed: chairs stacked, children dispatched home in orderly clusters. By morning, the palm trees were bent sideways and the power was gone. Yet by afternoon, my mother was already reorganising the kitchen by candlelight, humming to herself. “The storm always shows you what actually matters,” she said, with the matter-of-fact calm of someone who’d weathered many. I was eleven. I didn’t understand then that she was teaching me the most useful professional skill I’d ever have.
Years later, sitting in a glass-walled conference room in Pretoria at a flagship report launch unravelled in real time — supplier delay, wrong regulatory filing, the wrong version of a deck circulating — I felt that same shift in my chest. Not panic. Something older. The storm always shows you what matters.
Why we’re afraid of disorder
Most professional environments are, at their core, temples to the illusion of control. We build processes, maintain calendars with fifteen-minute blocks, run retrospectives. And this is not wrong — structure is genuinely useful. But somewhere along the way, many of us began to confuse the map for the territory. We started treating our plans as reality, and treating disruption as failure.
I’ve watched this play out in boardrooms in Geneva, in strategy meetings in Johannesburg, in startup all-hands calls in Mahajanga. The room freezes when something goes sideways. Someone reaches for a framework. Someone else asks whether there’s a precedent. Meanwhile the actual problem keeps evolving, waiting for a person comfortable enough with uncertainty to engage it directly.
That comfort — that capacity to stay functional when things are genuinely unclear — is not a personality trait. It’s a skill. And it’s one that only gets built through exposure to manageable disorder.
The Seychelles lesson: resilience isn’t prepared, it’s practiced
Growing up on a small island, chaos was seasonal and communal. Strong winds threats. Fishing boats that didn’t return on schedule. Power outages that lasted days, not hours. There was no infrastructure to absorb the disruption for you — you absorbed it yourself, or you helped someone else do it. What this produced wasn’t fearlessness. It produced functional tolerance of ambiguity — the ability to keep thinking clearly when the situation was unclear.
I’ve come to believe this is the single most undervalued competency in professional life. More than strategic thinking. More than communication skills. More than subject matter expertise. Because expertise gets you to the table; tolerance of ambiguity determines what you do when the table starts shaking.
What research (and lived experience) both suggest
There’s a concept from organisational psychology called “optimal stress” — the idea that performance doesn’t peak in conditions of total calm, but in conditions of moderate, recoverable challenge. Too little pressure and we coast. Too much and we freeze. The sweet spot is a state of mild, productive discomfort.
This matches what I observed during a career transition from product management to strategy consulting. The first six months were, frankly, destabilising. New environment, new relationships, new mental models required for every client engagement. My output felt uneven. My confidence wobbled.
But something else was happening underneath. I was being forced to think more flexibly. I was making analogies across industries I’d never connected before. I was developing a tolerance for “I don’t know yet” that I hadn’t needed when operating in a domain where I already knew most of the answers. By month nine, I was contributing insights that colleagues with deeper sector knowledge couldn’t, precisely because I hadn’t yet learned what was “impossible” in their field.
Disruption can be a factory for perspective — but only if you don’t spend all your energy resisting it.
The practical case for embracing controlled chaos
None of this is an argument for manufacturing crisis, or for organisations that run on permanent fire-drill energy. That’s not productive chaos — that’s just poor management wearing an innovation costume. The distinction matters enormously.
What does work: deliberately placing yourself in situations with slightly more ambiguity than feels comfortable, on a regular basis. Take the project without the clear brief. Join the working group outside your domain. Say yes to the conference panel where you’re not the expert in the room. Travel somewhere you don’t speak the language and have to solve real problems in real time — which, as someone who has navigated bureaucratic paperwork in Malagasy with a pocket dictionary and considerable goodwill, I can confirm is an extremely efficient teacher.
Measure whether it’s working not by how smoothly things go, but by how quickly you recover your clarity when they don’t. That recovery time — from confusion to productive action — is the actual metric. A year into this practice, mine had halved.
One thing to carry with you
There’s a word in Seychellois Creole — débrouillard — borrowed from the French, meaning someone who finds a way, regardless. Not someone who planned ahead perfectly. Not someone who never panics. Someone who, when the situation shifts, shifts with it.
It is the highest compliment you can pay a person on the islands. I think it might be the highest compliment you can pay a professional anywhere.
The next time a project fractures, a launch stumbles, or a Monday morning arrives with a problem no one anticipated — notice what you do in the first five minutes. That window is the real measurement of your professional development. Not the outcome. The response.
L J Padayachy 
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