A few months ago, a CEO called me after a… let’s say… failed reorganization. His team was demotivated, the flagship project had collapsed, and he could feel morale slipping away.
His question: “How do I re-motivate my teams?”
I answered something that surprised him: “You don’t have a motivation problem. You have a direction problem.”
Failure is not what you think it is
In a linear world — the world of our parents, the world of the industrial revolution — a failure is a calculation error. You identify what went wrong, you fix it, you start again. It’s mechanics.
But we no longer live in a linear world. We live in a chaotic world in the scientific sense of the term: a world where small causes produce huge effects, where crises spread unpredictably, and where five-year plans don’t survive five months.
In a chaotic system, a failure is not a mechanical error. It’s what scientists call a bifurcation — a moment when the system leaves its state of equilibrium and can tip into two very different directions: collapse or emergence.
The good news? By understanding how chaotic systems work, we can influence the direction of that bifurcation.
First mistake: trying to “go back to the way it was”
It’s the most natural reflex — and the most counterproductive. After a failure, everyone wants to recover the previous state, the comfort of what used to work.
But chaos theory teaches us something fundamental: once you’ve passed a tipping point, you can’t go back. Think about remote work after COVID — it would have taken 20 years of linear progression to reach the levels we achieved in a few months. There was no going back.
When a team has been through a significant failure, it has crossed a threshold. Relationships have changed. Trust has been shaken. Certainties have cracked. Trying to “boost morale” to return to the previous state is like trying to “unscramble a scrambled egg,” as the second law of thermodynamics puts it.
The question isn’t: how do we go back? The question is: where are we going now?
The strange attractor: your compass after the storm
In a chaotic system, you can’t predict exactly what will happen. But it’s not just random either. There is a hidden order — what scientists call a strange attractor.
Think of a river in flood. Impossible to predict where each whirlpool will form. But the river doesn’t flow in just any direction: it follows its bed, it tends toward the sea. That’s its strange attractor.
After a failure, the leader’s role is not to control every detail of the recovery. It’s to make sure the team has a strange attractor clear and powerful enough that energies naturally gravitate in the right direction.
Concretely, this means answering a simple — and often neglected — question: why do we exist as a team? Where are we really heading?
Not the quarterly targets. Not Q3 revenue. The deeper reason.
If each of your team members had to explain in one sentence where your organization is heading — would they agree? If the answer is no, you’re navigating a flood without a riverbed. And that’s where demotivation sets in — not because of the failure, but because of the absence of a direction.
The CEO who had called me understood this. He stopped trying to “re-motivate” his teams with team-building seminars and inspirational speeches. He took the time to re-clarify the direction with them — their shared strange attractor. And motivation came back naturally, because it had found meaning again.
Exponential routines: the micro-gestures that rebuild trust
Having a clear direction is necessary. But it’s not sufficient. After a failure, what’s broken is often trust — in oneself, in the team, in the project. And trust isn’t restored with a speech. It’s rebuilt through repeated micro-gestures.
This is the butterfly effect at work: in a chaotic system, small causes can produce huge effects — provided they are well placed and repeated. This is what I call exponential routines.
I’ve seen leaders transform their team’s dynamics after a failure with gestures that seem trivial:
- Systematically replacing “yes, but” with “yes, and” in meetings. It seems like nothing — and yet, repeated day after day, it radically changes the energy of a team. “Yes, but” closes. “Yes, and” opens.
- Introducing walking meetings rather than sitting in a meeting room. I remember a startup CEO who once told me “keep your coat on, we’ll do the meeting walking outside.” I was skeptical. A few minutes were enough to notice that the conversation was more open, more creative, more honest.
- Asking every visitor for an “astonishment report” — what surprised you about us? This outside perspective, collected regularly, becomes an extraordinary source of weak signals about the team’s culture.
These routines are not gimmicks. They are examples of collective exponential routines. It’s direction and repetition that create emergence.
Failure as bifurcation: toward collapse or toward emergence
After the chaotic phase, there can be collapse. The system breaks down. But there can also be emergence — the appearance of a new equilibrium, always more complex and richer than the previous one. Edgar Morin calls this metamorphosis.
A team failure is exactly that kind of moment. The threshold has been crossed, things will never be the way they were. But what comes next depends on two things: the clarity of the direction (the strange attractor) and the quality of the repeated micro-gestures (the exponential routines).
The leaders who turn a failure into a springboard are not the ones who “re-motivate.” They are the ones who understand that they can’t control what happens — but that they have immense power to influence the direction.
What you can do this week
If your team is going through a difficult period after a failure, here are three concrete actions:
- Take the time to (re)clarify your strange attractor. Gather your team and ask the question: why are we here? Where do we want to go? Not the targets — the direction. And accept that this direction has the right to change.
- Choose one or two exponential routines to test together for three weeks. Try, adapt, adopt — or not. The “yes, and,” the walking meetings, the astonishment report — it doesn’t matter which one, as long as it’s simple and repeatable.
- Stop trying to control the rebound. You have never had so little control — and you have never had so much power to influence things!
→ 5 tools to thrive in uncertainty
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.
