Built to Beat Chaos

CHAPTER 16Someone Who Builds Oneness

…the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Ephesians 4

By now, I hope you are starting to see how the pieces in this book fit together—how it is that we overcome chaos. Let's reconstruct the logic of doing so:

• Know that people are created to win. They not only want to win—they need to win. It is one of our deepest human needs.
• Work together. We can't attain most of the things we want by ourselves. We have to figure out how to work together, yet our individual desires fight us.
• Expect difficulty. Working together is always a challenge, and it always will be. The more the community grows, the more complex our communication and coordination tasks become. This means we have to leverage people and managerial processes to manage this complexity. Since the laws of physics don't apply to human behavior, it is more difficult to scale the number of people in a building than it is the buildings they occupy.
• Relationships come first. The primary bonding force for humans is the strength of our relationships, the intangible sense of people caring about us and us them and a mutual caring about shared purposes. This creates trust.
• Purpose is key. For people to win in a group setting, they need to see how they contribute to the team's purpose. This, too, requires complete honesty and openness.

In this chapter we will dig ...