What an opera in Verona and 85 billion neurons say about leading
I saw my first opera in Verona. La Traviata, almost three hours, and I was dreading the boredom. I was sitting a few rows from the orchestra, with an almost entirely direct sound, and that closeness changed everything. From that close, you do not hear a work of art. You hear bows scraping, breath pushed into brass, a music stand creaking, a hand turning a page. Disorder. Then, without my knowing exactly when, it all assembled and I was carried away.
The music was not in the instruments I could hear. It was one level above.
I often think back to that evening when a leader tells me they feel they are losing control. Almost always, the problem is not a lack of control. It is that they are looking for order at the wrong level.
The component is unstable, the whole is stable
That intuition has just received confirmation from an unexpected place: neuroscience. In June 2026, UC Santa Barbara highlighted the work of Fatih Dinc, a physicist turned neuroscientist, awarded the Richard C. DiPrima Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for a thesis that takes on a formidable puzzle.
The puzzle is this. Our mind emerges from the activity of roughly 85 billion neurons connected by some 100 trillion connections. Yet taken one by one, those neurons are what Dinc calls unreliable narrators. A cell that responds vigorously to a stimulus on Monday may be silent by Friday. Individual properties drift continuously. And still, behavior stays stable over time. You remember your own name today as you did yesterday, with components that have changed in between.
His way of framing the problem is worth quoting in full: “Imagine trying to understand a symphony by recording each musician individually. But in our case, the musicians keep switching seats and changing instruments from day to day. Also, you get to observe only 0.1% of the musicians at any given time.”
That is precisely the situation of a leader trying to understand their organization one employee, one metric, one meeting at a time. They are recording the musicians individually. And observing a tiny fraction of them.
Meaning lives in a very small space
The most interesting part of this work lies elsewhere. Dinc does not stop at noting the noise, he shows where the order sits. The brain appears to encode information in relatively large, simple patterns embedded in a far more complex system. Again, his formulation is crisp: “Even though a symphony involves 80 musicians playing simultaneously, the emotional arc of the piece might be captured by just a handful of musical themes. The brain is similar, thousands of neurons are active, but the meaningful computation might live in a 3- or 4-dimensional subspace.”
Thousands of components in motion, and the meaning fitting into three or four dimensions. It is those large patterns, not the components, that account for the stability of the whole. Finding that subspace is the whole challenge.
I recognize that description immediately. In chaos theory, a system can be entirely unpredictable in the detail of its trajectories and perfectly stable in its overall shape. We call that a strange attractor. No trajectory ever repeats, and all of them stay caught inside the same figure.
I do not extend Dinc’s work and I do not inherit from it: he describes a brain, while I have spent twenty years, starting from the same scientific sources of Prigogine, Lorenz and Mandelbrot, on what these discoveries change for leading an organization. We arrive at the same place by two independent paths. The stable order of a chaotic system is not in its components. It is one level above.
That is what I call emergence, and it is the most literal translation of the phrase I have been repeating for years: chaos isn’t chaos.
Why trying to control every note exhausts you
Look now at what most organizations do when uncertainty rises. They go down a level. More reporting, more review meetings, more metrics, more sign-offs. The reflex is understandable: since the whole is slipping away, you tighten your grip on the details.
That reflex loses twice over.
It is exhausting. Trying to hold every note of an 80-piece orchestra is infinite work, and you will only ever observe a fraction of it. Every control you add consumes time and attention that no longer go to direction.
It is ineffective. You are looking for stability where it does not sit. The components of a living system drift, that is their nature: people change, markets move, priorities shift. A neuron is unreliable and the brain works anyway. An employee is unpredictable and the organization can hold anyway. Reliability does not come from the reliability of the parts, it comes from the quality of the overall pattern.
Looking for order at the level of detail is like trying to hear the symphony by pressing your ear against a violin.
Hold the theme, not the notes
That leaves the question a leader cares about: concretely, what do we do? Chaos theory applied to management offers two tools, and they work as a pair.
The first is the strange attractor. Your job is not to choose the trajectories, it is to define the point the whole system moves toward. A clear direction, embodied, repeated, firm enough to hold the whole together and loose enough to let everyone find their own way. Not a map, a compass. It is the musical theme: it does not dictate every note, it makes every note belong to the same work. In practice, that means being able to state in three or four sentences where you are going, then holding it without changing it every quarter. Three or four dimensions, exactly like Dinc’s subspace.
The second is exponential routines. A theme stated once does not make a symphony. What makes a pattern hold over time is repetition. Small daily actions, regular, aligned with the direction, that through the butterfly effect compound and end up producing large effects. A five-minute ritual at the start of a meeting that restates the bearing. One decision a week settled out loud in the name of that bearing. A story told rather than a dashboard reviewed.
Direction without repetition stays a wish. Repetition without direction burns out. The two together, what I sum up as Direction plus Repetition, are how you steer at the right level.
And there is a benefit nobody expects: it is far less tiring. You stop chasing what you will never master, and concentrate on the three or four things you genuinely do.
What you can only see from a distance
Three questions are enough to tell whether you are steering at the right level. Could your teams state your direction without looking at a document? How many of last week’s meetings were about the bearing rather than about small deviations? And if you disappeared for three weeks, would the pattern hold?
The evening of La Traviata, I spent the first act hearing noise. After that, I stopped listening to the instruments. From close up, there were only bows, breath and pages turning. The music was one level above.
We have never had so little control, and never so much power to influence things.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. An international bilingual English-French keynote speaker, he works with executives and organizations in more than 40 countries. He is the author of Chaos, A User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
