Uncertainty Isn’t the Problem. Control Is.

Mess is the Terrain, Not the Destination. Navigate uncertainty by embracing the dance between chaos and order. Enter Catalytic Stewardship.

The Mess is Not the Point: Reframing Transformation in Times of Upheaval

In many circles of change-making, from systems transformation to climate work to personal development, there’s a growing reverence for “the messy middle”. The liminal space. The in-between. And rightly so: real change isn’t neat.

But I’ve noticed a subtle shift lately. A temptation to romanticise the mess itself. As if messiness is inherently more authentic, more radical, more alive. As if ambiguity is a virtue, and chaos is the goal.

Here’s the thing: the mess is not the point. It’s the passage.

What follows is a reflection I wrote in response to a powerful piece of research by Jake Buckton, which explores frameworks for climate transformation within the Arts & Culture sector. One of the emerging themes is the spectrum of preferences toward change — from explosive to messy to ordered.

I want to offer another layer: that these states are not opposites, but movements in a larger dance. That what’s needed is not a side to pick, but a capacity to steward what unfolds between them.

Mess is the Terrain, Not the Destination

Messiness, the ambiguity, disarray, uncertainty of change, isn’t a failing or a flaw. But it’s also not a state to idolise. It’s a necessary condition that arises when old forms are dissolving and new ones haven’t yet taken shape.

Too often, we confuse our discomfort with mess as a resistance to change. But perhaps it’s a resistance to the felt sense of disorder. Something we’ve been trained, traumatised, and tamed out of tolerating.

To move through mess, we don’t need to be told to embrace chaos. We need to rebuild our nervous systems’ capacity to be with it.

Transformation Is an Oscillating Dance

If we zoom out, it might help to think of transformation not as a linear journey from fixed state to fixed state, but as an oscillating dance between disruption and reorientation.

A catalyst, whether large-scale like a pandemic, political shock, or ecological collapse — or intimate like a heartbreak, burnout, or identity rupture, initiates a crack in the prevailing order.

That’s the “explosion”. What follows is the unsettling mess: the liminal phase where something must be felt for, formed, and eventually stabilised.

But the middle isn’t just messy. It’s full of grief. Grief for what was lost, for what no longer fits, for the illusions or certainties we can’t cling to anymore. This mourning is not separate from transformation. It is the emotional metabolising that allows space for something new to emerge.

Without the catalyst, people won’t move. Without the mess, nothing new gestates. And without the resilience to stay with the mess, people scramble for false endings.

Binary Thinking Is a Fear Response

It’s tempting to frame these orientations — explosive versus messy, order versus chaos — as binaries. But binary thinking is often a fear response: a way to simplify overwhelming complexity in order to feel some semblance of control.

That very mechanism, the rush to categorise, to choose a “side”, can become the block to transformation itself. It creates false oppositions where fluid movement is needed. In reality, these modes are not competing ends of a spectrum, but mutually necessary phases of metamorphosis.

The System Isn't Chaotic — We Are

What we call “chaos” in our world is often a deeply efficient system working too well in the wrong direction — neoliberalism, extraction, dominance. The real disorder lives in our emotional responses, in our attempts to reconcile the dissonance between surface order and deep unliveability. The invisible makings of burnout.

This is why transformation work must be both systemic and psycho-emotional. It’s not enough to dismantle the external structures, we must also untangle the internal ones.

Toward Catalytic Stewardship

What’s needed is neither a glorification of disorder nor a grasping for control but a third stance: catalytic stewardship.

A form of leadership that initiates rupture with care. That designs interventions not just for impact, but for integration. That helps people stay in the liminal without numbing, collapsing, or settling for premature closure.

As Rodriguez Carreon says: learn to stay in limbo. Yes. But let’s not fetishise the limbo itself. It’s a crucible, not a cradle.

Practically, this could look like designing processes and spaces that increase people’s tolerance for uncertainty, grief, and complexity while also offering gentle provocations, controlled burns that disrupt stagnation without burning people out.

New Romanticism and the Role of the Inner World

In my own coaching and change work, I call this approach New Romanticism, not in the nostalgic sense, but as a call to re-enchant the internal landscapes of transformation. To honour emotion, beauty, longing, and imagination as tools for change, not distractions from it. It is this that helps inoculate us through any perceived turmoil.

We need more than roadmaps and metrics. We need soul scaffolding. We need the poetic and the practical. We need ways to feel, fall apart, and re-form. Not just as individuals, but as cultures in metamorphosis.

---

✴︎ Ready to Begin Again?

If you’re navigating a change — personal or professional, structural or spiritual — and you find yourself in the mess, let’s work together to make sense of the in-between.

My coaching offers a space for catalytic stewardship of your own process.
Where uncertainty isn’t pathologised, but listened to.
Where grief is welcomed, and re-forming is supported.
Where the mess is honoured, but never mistaken for the destination.