Ганна Горб "Хаос. Не можеш приборкати - очоль!"

Summary

Hanna Horb argues that project “chaos” often reflects a mismatch between a person’s expectations and the organization’s culture—not necessarily a broken system. Before imposing new processes, managers should understand how decisions are made, what people value, and what is already producing results. Her guiding principle is: what is useful matters more than what is theoretically correct.

Frameworks and playbooks

• Charles Handy’s organizational culture model: Assess culture across two dimensions: hierarchy (strong or weak) and clarity of rules (high or low). The resulting types are:
  • Power: Centralized authority and decisive leadership.
  • Role: Formal responsibilities, rules, and procedures.
  • Task: Work organized around solving a problem or completing a task.
  • Person: Individual autonomy and expertise.

A mismatch between someone’s preferred culture and the surrounding organization can cause frustration and resistance. None of the types is inherently right or wrong; context matters.

• Choose a change approach based on urgency and capacity:
  • Revolutionary change can deliver quick, substantial results but requires significant effort, authority, and tolerance for resistance. Use it when delay is untenable and the change agent has the resources and mandate to act.
  • Evolutionary change introduces smaller adjustments over time, generally lowering resistance and preserving useful experience. The tradeoff is slower progress and potentially repeated, smaller periods of disruption.

Horb generally favors evolution, while recognizing that urgent business conditions can justify more direct intervention.

• “Repeat, change, create” — a Shu-Ha-Ri-like progression:

  1. Repeat: Observe existing routines and learn how work, decisions, and handoffs actually happen.
  2. Change: Once the value in existing practices is understood, improve them incrementally.
  3. Create: Add new practices and retire old ones gradually, without destabilizing the system unnecessarily.

• Use the organization’s existing “paths”: Start with practices people already follow rather than designing an ideal process in isolation. Identify which behaviors produce value, then redirect them toward better outcomes.

• Tailor influence to the person and culture: For a hierarchy-oriented leader, escalation through the management chain may be more effective than informal persuasion. For someone focused on formal rules, present evidence about process outcomes. For someone focused on relationships, explain the effects on trust, retention, and team wellbeing.

Change management and leadership takeaways

• Expect disruption when changing a team’s routines. People may initially engage, then resist, before settling into new norms and performing effectively.
• The speaker gives about three months as an average storming period, while stressing that duration varies with the scale of change and team stability. In fast-moving environments, teams may experience repeated or near-continuous disruption.
• Build change through visible examples and credible advocates. To shift culture, managers should model the behavior themselves and recruit respected colleagues to reinforce it.
• Distinguish a system that is unfamiliar from one that is failing. If delivery is continuing, the process may be working even if its logic is not yet clear—but that does not mean the organization should ignore burnout or hidden costs.
• Consider the time horizon. A short-term project may call for different people investments than a long-running team. For ongoing work, preserving team capacity and investing in people can be important to sustained results.
• Treat resistance as information. Investigate whether it reflects a legitimate concern, personal preference, or deliberate undermining of agreed team practices before deciding how to respond.

Examples and metrics

• Department turnaround: Horb described joining a department with very low predictability and more complaints than completed tasks. After roughly two to three months, the team had established a pipeline and roadmap. Delivery dates were still not consistently accurate, but she estimated that predictability and frustration had each improved by about 50%. These were approximate assessments, not formal KPIs.
• Daily coordination: In a previous team, she made a daily check-in a standard routine and consistently reinforced attendance. The team eventually adopted it without her prompting. This illustrates firm, repeated implementation of a small change—not proof that daily meetings are appropriate for every team.
• Manager-driven overhaul: A participant described a new manager making sweeping changes before understanding a project, resulting in wasted time and disruption. Horb used this to illustrate the risks of revolutionary change without sufficient context.
• No commercial KPIs were reported: The discussion mentions the business need to adapt to competition and make money, but provides no revenue, margin, or other financial figures.

Presenters and sources

Presenter: Hanna Horb.

Models and thinkers referenced: Charles Handy’s organizational culture model; Edgar Schein on culture and strategy; Carl Jung on order within chaos; and a martial-arts-derived “repeat, change, create” learning progression. The event host, moderator, and audience members also contributed to the discussion and Q&A.