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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
I’ve noticed that many organisations, especially those working under strict regulatory regimes like NIS2, struggle with getting their products out. While it’s easy to blame the regulations themselves, I’d argue that the issue is a lot more nuanced than that.
The short version is that the kinds of organisations that work under tight regulations are forced to focus on being stable; after all, you need to check that all the rules are followed. This clashes with the modern need for speed. If you don’t deliver your product or service quickly, you’ll likely lose whatever competitive edge you have.
Many organisations, when faced with this dilemma, whether they realise it or not, flounder and opt for the worst of both worlds. They will slow down and add more hierarchy to seem more stable, but this added complexity breeds its own issues, as multiple people will need to sign off on everything. I call this “slow chaos,” and it’s a killer for productivity and company-wide morale.
In my view, slow chaos is caused by instability within the organisation and processes, not by purely technical hurdles. It’s driven by an organisational inertia which sees speed as being opposed to quality and worries about the inherent risks of change. This manifests in three key areas.
A good example is the friction between using Agile methodologies, which focus on short-term sprints, and departments that are focused on long-term priorities. This inevitably leads to poor resource allocation, which is then solved through increased micro-management to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
That never seems to solve the issue, either, and the easiest fix is to install more layers of management. This adds more scrutiny of the work being done, which necessitates more busywork, until eventually the works are entirely gummed up.
Another issue I’ve come across is an organisational tendency to view “running” systems as being alien to change. This makes it so that systems aren’t kept up to date, and become an expensive legacy. Not only will these systems cost more to maintain in the long run, but their lack of compatibility with new processes means more work, too.
Finally, there are issues surrounding frameworks like NIS2 and their implementation. The kind of organisational structure that encourages slow chaos also directly compromises critical compliance goals, despite having meeting these standards as its main concern.
Fact is, chaos does not make compliance any easier, and in fact makes it much easier for failures in data governance to go undetected. This may lead to breaches of NIS2 standards or GDPR infractions, which leads to fines and erosion of trust in your organisation.
To break this paralysis, I imagine a transition from prioritising efficiency to maximising speed by embracing extremely short iteration cycles. This would exchange the current focus on economies of scale for economies of speed, breaking the loop of constant organisational feedback and removing the hurdles that lead to slow chaos.
To set this in motion, organisations need to implement the wholesale adoption of practices focused on accelerating flow and feedback loops, as quantified by DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and mean time to repair). Here are some examples below:
A good first step is scaling down teams. Small, autonomous, loosely coupled teams are able to make changes rapidly with minimal coordination, reducing the crippling wait times and dependencies typical of traditional IT. However, management must be flexible enough to actually grant them this autonomy.
Speed is gained not only by working harder, but by waiting less. Organisations should dismantle long, manual processes – such as those governed by Change Advisory Boards (CABs) or centralised infrastructure provisioning – which slow deployment frequency. The goal is self-service tooling and automation of as much as possible. This should speed up processes from weeks to minutes.
Finally, governance can’t remain a bureaucratic impediment; it has to be automated and embedded in the delivery pipeline using Architectural Fitness Functions (AFFs). AFFs enforce standards continuously, ensuring critical requirements like resilience, security policies, and architectural constraints are met with every change. This builds compliance into the system and doesn’t make it a box that’s ticked as a final step.
Slow chaos can only be overcome by a systemic shift in how we work. Teams need to be restructured to work within short, predictable delivery cycles, with far less managerial oversight. At the same time, governance needs to be built into the system rather than being tacked on at a later stage. Doing so will not just speed up the entire process, but also make it safer. Efficiency will follow from this naturally, eventually leading to a leaner, but also a better organisation. You will end up using fewer resources for even better results, without needless layers of management.
