Embracing chaos

A choice to be made

A long long time ago, in a city far far away, I made a decision that kinda changed my life in a big way.

Being slightly wierd about stuff and wanting to be free of the tyranny of choice, I threw out *all* my socks, and bought 12 pairs of identical black ones.

I was just at one of those stages of life where I thought that I was spending entirely too much time pairing socks after washing them. So, replacing all of them seemed like a good idea. “Any colour, as long as it’s black”, right ? And black goes with pretty much anything, right ? To this day, I only have 2 colours of socks (black and grey), and they are of different styles, so I can’t get them mixed up.

This only kinda changed my life. There was another incident a few years back that changed my perspective quite dramatically.

An epiphany of sorts

It was on a training course – 5 days of Sharepoint 2013 installation and configuration – and, as you might imagine, we tended to have long tangential discussions to relieve the tension and create a human bond in the classroom.

The instructor asked if anyone had any ridiculous rules to live by. I mentioned the sock thing, naturally…

And this is where the game levelled up dramatically. The instructor revealed that *he* had the *same* inclination when it came to socks, but his approach to finding a solution was so different, so radical, that it changed my life.

His theory was that, even with careful planning, socks wear out and need replacing, thereby introducing variation in foot attire that was almost, but not exactly, the same as the original problem – socks that don’t match and need to.

So he bought his socks online, in packs of three, that were *guaranteed* not to match. He was happier for bringing more colour into his life, and was still freed from the tyranny of choice – socks ain’t gonna match, so why waste time worrying about them ?

Life-changing times

Once you accept that there’s always going to be some variation in a given scenario (and also accepting that any variation has the capacity to drive you insane), perhaps embracing chaos is the way to go. It’s quite liberating to realise that there are certain elements you can’t control, but you can influence some elements that you have no control over by putting them in a ‘no control’ bucket. Let me contextualise that a bit more….

We’re rolling out Microsoft Teams to update our collaboration and promote new ways of working. Nothing to do with Skype For Business being sunsetted, no, nothing to do with that at all…

One question that comes up fairly frequently in the forums is the one about being able to delete chats – something that at time of writing we’re not able to do. We can delete individual comments, but the chat lives on. It just disappears off the ‘recents’ list.

If you’re the sort of person who likes a tidy mailbox and keeps everything in apple-pie order, I can see that this might cause some people ‘issues’ in the same way as socks did for me.

However, the persistance of chats and messages in a searchable log is a Very Good Thing. Hands up if you’ve ever searched emails or other electronic conversations for a half-remembered detail or needed to prove how a decision was made ? If the conversation had been deleted, there would be nothing to go search in and personally I’d spend quite a bit of time wondering if I’d just imagined something…

The fact that I can’t delete chats or messages in Teams is therefore in one of those ‘no control’ buckets – I accept that I can’t change it, but I know I can leverage the features that a lack of control actually brings by being able to search the archive. And that has to be a win.

What’s next ?

To be honest, I don’t know what’s next. There’s a lot of choice in the data world at the moment. So much choice that to some it’s daunting, to others completely overwhelming. Have a read of this blog, and tell me that the infographic doesn’t trigger at least *some* anxiety – how are we supposed to make architectural sense of that ?

Not sure, but I’ll be embracing that ‘chaos’ and looking for what it can deliver for me, my colleagues, and our services.

Thanks for reading.