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The 11th hour change was just one example of causing chaos provided by a leader, but for the sake of argument, let's focus on it. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a product does ship next week, there are some pretty critical flaws, and we're doing some final review with leadership. I think we can still raise red flags and follow the author's advice. The author of this article is suggesting there's a good way and a bad way to handle this.

Bad way: "Back to the drawing board, we can't ship, this is garbage."

Good way: "I see some serious errors here, let's outline them and make a plan to address these specifically."

I really like article's litmus test because of this - "Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it." That's not suggesting that there can't be a change of plan.

I think your reply is a bit disingenuous though, because whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly. Otherwise all you are talking about is having good manners and diplomacy, which is not what the article is talking about.

If you propose the changes, you’re rocking the boat. And if they are urgent and can’t be overlooked for the convenience of sticking to the status quo for others, you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.

The article’s advice is about reading the room and doing what won’t upset the others, because if we reinforce this as a norm, then existing leaders don’t feel threatened, and we can all celebrate mediocrity and keep our jobs. The more we advocate for this to have a hallowed place in our most critical workplace social norms, the more that the dissent of intellectual integrity can be quelled, so people write like this to popularize that tribal norm.

> whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly.

Respectfully, I disagree. One scenario results in a plan, one doesn't, and that's a core distinction between the two scenarios. Whether it's a good plan or not is a subject of opinion, but its presence or absence is not.

> you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.

That's not true in my experience. It sounds like you've worked in some pretty rough places!

Not really. I’ve worked in three large publicly traded ecommerce companies that are household names, one large education tech company, two startups and a defense research lab after grad school.

All of them were identical in this regard. What defines a “good plan” or what qualifies as “good leadership” is fully subjective and at the discretion of leaders most interested in entrenching their power.

This also has a lot of research behind it, eg like in the book Moral Mazes.

The description you give sounds like an extreme outlier that doesn’t have relevance for that vast majority of modern workplaces.

(OP - thanks for reading!)

Yup, that was exactly the idea ^^. Plans need to change all the time, that's expected and just a part of life. The goal is just to raise red flags in a way that adds clarity and helps people to productively adjust.

We should remember that conflict does not equal chaos.

A good leader should not be afraid of conflict and keep open to conflicting ideas to his/her own while still being assertive about his/her ideas.

To introduce conflict, a leader does not necessarily resort to chaos. As an example, a leader in an oligarchic group can resort to persuasion to sway votes to his/her peers instead of causing discord between his/her follower/team-member and his/her peer's follower.

Some of my personal experience tells me that persuasions are easier for an opposing ideas to seep into the whole group rather than direct confrontations.

Whether it’s well managed conflict or chaos will totally be opinion / politics based. In fact, it’s articles like this one that are exactly the type of thinking used to politically argue that something which is in reality just well managed conflict about urgently needed changes is instead FUD-style disinformation or chaotic unprofessional communication.

“Chaos” is in the eye of the beholder and “don’t create chaos” means stay subservient to the eye of the beholder.

> Don’t rock the boat. Don’t go against the grain. Just keep your head down, forget your creativity, don’t lobby hard for what’s right

I don't think that is what the article is implying in any way.

It’s not implying it, rather it’s the explicit central premise. It’s just dressing it up in other language to appear like a reasonable social norm.

If you come right out and say you’re using “avoid chaos” to steamroll reasonable dissent, your control will be undermined, because people can’t be seem aligning with an overt tyrant.

But if you say “avoid chaos” doesn’t steamroll reasonable dissent (even though it does), now people can argue, debate, obfuscate, whatever and rationalize they aren’t doing anything wrong by aligning with you, at least not publicly.