Honestly, we love uniformity. The human mind is trained to subscribe to a pattern. Isn’t that why we love watching satisfying video compilations of Chinese soldiers on a march past or foam beaten to a beautiful mush? Or ice cream melting? Someone giving a smooth haircut to an overgrown hedge with a single swipe of the lawn mower? The fact is, we thirst for uniformity and love the fact that everything can be broken down to a pattern. (Look, at this point in time, if you really want to open a separate window and start watching these videos, please do)

But that’s what a digital agency doesn’t (or let’s just say cannot) subscribe to. Not because it doesn’t want to but because an agency really thrives in chaos. Understand a little truth here - chaos is actually cool. And once you understand the whys and how of chaos, you get the best out of it.

We live in grids. In fact, in a very perverse way, we are conditioned to think grids. Perfect squares. But chaos allows us freedom from any and every pattern. And that liberation inspires creative thought. When you realize that Zag Zig is equally logical and in fact, full of possibilities as Zig Zag. Chaos is downside up as much as upside down. When you sit down to think ideas from a different perspective, imagine the canvas chaos provides.

Honestly, in all these years, I could never sit down with a coffee on my desk overlooking the city with a smoke in one hand and contemplate an idea. That’s a myth if you ask me. The real idea comes when you are rushing to the client to douse a fire. Or when you know, there’s two minutes for your boss to detonate. When agency heads call you on a weekend with an opening line – Shit has hit the roof guys! Real magic happens when chaos reigns.

Now here’s the other side of living in chaos: It doesn’t necessarily mean that an agency only enjoys chaos in everything it does. There’s always a blend of organizational uniformity. We do realize that at our raw best, we are really beasts. So, chaos isn’t pure chaos but identified and simulated chaos meant to yield results. That’s why any agency is defined by certain principles and goals, and no matter how chaotic it gets, we try working towards a common objective. I remember a founder pointing us to the vision statement every time we entered his cabin expecting a showdown. That vision aligned teams across the floor. And we returned to our desks, using chaos as a tool to generate ideas.
(While I’m writing this, I am also watching Felix Baumgartner’s Freefall from Space. And that’s oddly satisfying too.)

Nothing ever is uniform in an idea-based setup. There’s a brief to manage, a client to pacify, a pitch to present and a meeting to attend. But trust me when I say this, great ideas are a sum total of your diverse existence and chaos facilitates this diversity like nobody’s business. Literally.