Chaos Is a Culture — Not Just a Workflow Issue

There’s a kind of chaos that doesn’t feel like chaos when you’re in it.
It’s just… the way things are.
Someone knows what’s going on, someone always figures it out, and the problems that show up—well, they always get handled. Eventually.

But then someone takes a few days off.
And you find out the system you thought was running just fine wasn’t a system at all. It was a person.

We lost over a hundred sheets of material before anyone noticed.

The CNC was cutting like it always did. Operators were following the instructions like they always had. Projects were moving through the floor, numbers getting checked off, everything looked normal—until someone actually looked at the parts.

They were wrong. All of them.
Same mistake, over and over.

The dados were off by a half-inch.

I asked the new operator, “Did you check the file against the program?”
He said, “Yeah. I just ran it.”
“Did you have to adjust the origin at all?”
“No… why?”

We brought in one of the leads who’d been shadowing the guy who usually ran that machine. I asked him what the hell was going on. He looked at the screen, looked at the parts, looked at me, and said:

“Oh, he usually offsets the bed by a half-inch before he runs anything.”
I said, “He does what?”
He repeated it like it was common knowledge.
“Yeah, otherwise the dados are off. He always adjusts for it.”

And just like that, three days of production were junk.

That operator—smart guy, high output, reliable—he was the real process. The software, the engineering team, the machine itself… they were just props. The real system lived in his hands and in his habits. The second he stepped away, the floor revealed exactly how fragile it all was.

It’s easy to chalk that up to a communication miss.
Maybe a training issue. Maybe documentation.

But that’s not the root.

The root is that we built a culture where everyone assumed someone else knew.
Where “this is how it’s always done” became policy.
Where no one owned the full picture, and everyone trusted the workaround.

And trust me—there’s always a workaround.
Every team has one.
It lives in tribal knowledge, in a shortcut no one talks about, in the fix that someone made five years ago and never told the next guy.

But when you start building your operation around that kind of quiet chaos, it doesn’t matter how nice your Gantt charts look or how many layers of software you’ve stacked on top. The moment someone leaves, pauses, or misses a beat—the whole thing drops.

That CNC mistake cost us thousands in time and material.
But the real loss was deeper.
We had a culture where fragility was hiding in plain sight.

And here’s the thing about cultures like that:
They don’t start with bad people.
They start with silence.

The silence of not asking why something works.
The silence of not questioning the workaround.
The silence of trusting speed over clarity.

Chaos doesn’t walk through the front door and announce itself.
It seeps in through convenience.
It makes itself comfortable in the gaps between teams.
It rewards firefighters and burns out builders.

I’ve been that firefighter.
I’ve run jobs with my teeth gritted, a clipboard in one hand and a phone in the other, pulling every favor I had just to make it to Friday. And I’ve been proud of it, too. Proud to be the one who made it work, again and again.
But the more I’ve learned—through people, through failure, through staring too long at the cost of burnout—the more I’ve realized something important:

If your process needs a hero to survive, you don’t have a process.
You have a dependency.
And that dependency is going to crack.

I don’t tell this story to make a point about CNC machines or tribal knowledge.
I tell it because it’s not the exception. It’s the pattern.
And it shows up everywhere.

It shows up when the guy who runs shipping is the only one who knows how to get around the inventory bug.
It shows up when the production manager has to “just fix it” because no one’s confident the numbers are right.
It shows up when the ERP looks good on the surface, but no one trusts it enough to follow it without second guessing.

It’s not that people don’t care.
It’s that the culture doesn’t demand better.

And when chaos becomes acceptable—when it becomes the thing you learn to work around instead of solve—it turns into your company’s operating system.

Changing that isn’t fast.
It’s not flashy either.

It means slowing down long enough to find the truths you’ve been working around.
It means admitting that the tools aren’t broken—the habits are.
It means asking uncomfortable questions before the crisis shows up again.

And more than anything, it means deciding that clarity isn’t a luxury.
It’s the minimum standard.

You can have the best people, the best equipment, the cleanest shop in town—
But if chaos is tolerated, it’ll run the show.

Until one day someone doesn’t show up.
And you finally see what was actually holding it together.