Are you a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet?

How to find futurist allies within your organization.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world…

… and one of those ways is to show you how to recognize who in your organization, industry, or ministry is apt to help you build its future with you.

When I have enough time with an organization or ministry to do some deep listening:

First, I’ll listen for whether the organization is Knight or Gardener in orientation and then whether that orientation matches its market or context. If there’s a match, good. If not, then pointing that out becomes first priority. (Running a Gardener church in a military town may be a mismatch; running a fire-breathing Knight church in a live-and-let-live town may get you run out of town on a rail. Treating a global systems issue as a security threat may do more harm than good.)

Then I’ll look for the Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets within the organization or congregation. They’re two different kinds of agents of change.

You should know which one you are, which one your friends are, your leaders are, and more. (Keep in mind that, like The Knight and The Gardener, this typology isn’t meant to be determinative but rather mostly true most of the time.)

In her now-classic article in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick posited that there are two kinds of Muppets in the Jim Henson pantheon and that the personalities of every human being on the planet tends toward one or the other kind. Each of us, she claims, is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet.

Chaos Muppets are iconoclasts and disruptors who are barely controllable but are capable of breakthrough genius. They are a system’s rejects so they march to their own drummers. Order Muppets believe the system works, belong to it, and love it. They secretly believe they are the ones who make the world run. They may be right.

Who are the Chaos and Order Muppets on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street?

• Chaos: Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, the Swedish Chef, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, Animal, the entire Electric Mayhem, Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Grover

• Order: Kermit the Frog, Scooter, Sam the Eagle, Statler and Waldorf, and Bert

Need a quick distinction of the two in a trailer for a TV show? Here you go: Muppets Mayhem... a TV show about a music studio attempting against Chaos to produce an album by Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem.

Among fictional detectives?

• Chaos: Sherlock Holmes, Agent Mulder from The X-Files

• Order: Dr. John Watson (an accomplished, established, respectable upper-crust English physician also was a maimed PTSD-riddled-adrenalin-thrill-junkie Afghan war veteran from the 1880s who hung out with Sherlock Holmes because Holmes took on the exciting and the macabre — an Order Muppet who couldn’t look away from Chaos Muppets), Agent Scully from The X-Files

Among the Founding Fathers?

• Chaos: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin

• Order: George Washington, John Adams

In the Bible?

• Chaos: Jesus (and all the heroes in his parables including the Prodigal Son’s father), Noah, and most of the prophets in the Old Testament, and perhaps David

• Order: The Apostle Paul, Moses, The Prodigal Son’s older brother

In superhero comic books?

• Chaos: The X-Men, Deadpool, Spider-Man, The Hulk

• Order: The Justice League (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern…), Captain America

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? (one of my new favorite TV series)

• Chaos: Spock (a barely contained Chaos Muppet), pilot Erica Ortegas, Dr. M’Benga, Nurse Chapel, Chief Engineer Pelia

• Order: Captain Pike, Number One, Uhura, security chief La’an Noonien-Singh

In other venues?

• Chaos: Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck, the entire team in the movie Inception (except Arthur, the team’s Order Muppet), John Wick, Jack Reacher, and James Bond (a Chaos Muppet deployed by Order Muppets), political crusaders like the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, most novelists and artists, some product development teams and marketers, and Tier One unit operators

• Order: Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, M and Q from the James Bond series, most lawyers, librarians, and corporate and Hollywood studio executives, and Tier One unit officers

More specifically…

Chaos Muppets are iconoclasts and disruptors who often have breakthrough insights. They don’t believe in (or emotionally belong to) the official workings of their organization, industry, or religion even when they deeply believe in its ideals and mission. They tend to be iconoclasts who can still see (and reverse and play with) the assumptions and conceptual building blocks that longtime members of an industry take for granted and have reduced to tried-and-true heuristics. They usually are the ones who can see when a process, an organization, or an entire industry is broken, isn’t meeting needs, is at risk, or is missing the point altogether. Rather than focus on measures of performance (how well the company is producing and selling) they care about measures of effectiveness (whether what the company is doing is making a real difference in the world).

Chaos Muppets may have the best diagnoses of your client’s problem, or have already done most of the forecasting the organization’s needs. And sometimes they have already figured out the solution. The problem, though, is that sometimes a Chaos Muppet’s solution is to transform, reorient, or supplant the existing order with a new one. As a result, Chaos Muppets sometimes get branded as contrarians, subversives, malcontents, and failures. Chaos Muppets are outsiders, know it, and are often treated that way. Chaos Muppets rarely belong. (I once witnessed someone tell a Chaos Muppet, “The best thing about you is the worst thing about you: you don’t play the game.”) Most professional futurists are Chaos Muppets.

Where can you find Chaos Muppets? In several places:

(1) in the parts of the C-suite where breakthrough insights are necessary. (Not all C-suites believe breakthrough insights are necessary.) Most times that means the CEO’s office or that of whichever senior leader articulates the vision… like the Chief Marketing Office or the head of public relations. In entrepreneurial/pioneer churches — ones in which God has called the congregation to do something morally new (as opposed to just plant the church in a new area to do conventional ministry) — the pastor is almost always a Chaos Muppet. In most conventional churches, though, the pastor is an Order Muppet riding herd over a staff of Chaos Muppet ministers and church members.

(2) the weirdthink offices, including R&D. Here’s a tip: if your organization doesn’t have a weirdthink office where Chaos Muppets can deconstruct and make change, your Chaos Muppets will be in the cafeteria drinking coffee and complaining. If they’re in the cafeteria or someplace similar that’s often a sign that the Order Muppets don’t have any internal truth-telling or warning function available to them.

(3) out in the parking lot at 5pm leaning against their car door dispirited, dejected, and crying like they did alone on the playground as a kid, wishing they’d been born more normal.

Order Muppets believe their organization’s, industry’s, or ministry’s system works, that it’s already doing the right things in the right ways, and that all that needs to be done is to stay the current course. They don’t believe in the status quo necessarily; they believe the current system will make the world better over time, that someday its incremental changes will reach a critical mass and transform some aspect of the world for the better. They believe the system is proven, tried-and-true, and that other approaches are suspect or perhaps inferior.

Order Muppets don’t think much about their entity’s measures of performance because they presume that measures of performance are measures of effectiveness. They think their performance is inherently effective… so much so that what and how they produce needs no questioning. They take pride in what they produce but sometimes don’t ask whether what they’ve done matters beyond the organization’s four walls.

Order Muppets are insiders. They belong. They succeed. Order Muppets reside in the middle to upper ranks of an organization; Chaos Muppets are usually in the middle to lower because they don’t fit in. (The only exception to this is if senior-rank Order Muppets recognize, appreciate, and listen to the Chaos Muppets at every level. This. Does. Happen. Sometimes.)

Order Muppets have the screwdriver. They build things. They build organizational capacities. They make things better within the company.

Where can you find Order Muppets? In several places…

(1) at their desks, in conference rooms, at company softball games. In the field on site.

(2) out in the parking lot at 5pm leaning against their car door after their system failed them or after the world itself went John Wick-level-Chaos-Muppet on them and they’re dispirited, dejected, and crying like they did alone on the playground as a kid, saying to themselves “I did everything I was supposed to. The whole time. And I didn’t get rewarded. I got rejected. I got punished. That wasn’t supposed to happen because I did what I was supposed to do. We did what we were supposed to do. We played by the rules. And we didn’t win. This is all so deeply unfair. I didn’t deserve this. We didn’t deserve this.”

Both Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets are tender-hearted. Of course they are. They’re Muppets. We’re Muppets. And sometimes they appreciate each other very deeply. That’s why Bert and Ernie are together. That’s why Kermit and Fozzie are best friends. When each is sad, the other is sad. When one is happy the other is happy.

And to build your future you’ll need both. You’ll need your Chaos Muppets to diagnose and forecast. You’ll need your Order Muppets to build. Without Chaos Muppets, Order Muppets build toward failure. Without Order Muppets, Chaos Muppets can’t build anything.

Find them. Point them out to each other. Make sure each appreciates the other.

And check on your parking lot at 5pm to see if there’s a broken-hearted Muppet leaning against their car door. They may need a word.