Listening this week to an edition of the BBC Podcast ‘The Bottom Line’ made me re-evaluate my thought process on the kind of businesses that allow for growth through chaos when one of the leaders being featured said “, You have to make mistakes.” It wasn’t from a startup founder romanticising failure, it was from Jesper Brodin, CEO of IKEA’s Ingka Group, a company that operates in more than 40 countries with 170,000 employees.

This speaks volumes about leadership in 2025.  The question isn’t whether chaos has a place in business; it’s whether we’ve learned how to organise it.

The myth of tidy leadership

We’ve been conditioned to believe that great leadership equals control: structure, policies, reporting lines. The tidy desk and the clean dashboard. But as the podcast explored, chaos, when channelled intentionally, can be far more productive than order.

Simon Dixon, CEO of HatMill, runs a consultancy with no job titles, no hierarchy and no job descriptions. Every employee decides what needs doing that day. It sounds reckless, but the company’s results and culture say otherwise. Twice recognised as a “Best Place to Work,” HatMill’s philosophy is simple: trust people to do the right thing.

It’s a striking reminder that bureaucracy often grows from fear, the fear of mistakes, inconsistency, or losing control. But what if our obsession with avoiding mistakes is the very thing stopping our people from doing their best work?

Netflix, IKEA and the art of organised chaos

Erin Meyer, co-author of No Rules Rules, explained how Netflix thrives by “managing on the edge of chaos.” The company removed almost all policies, no travel caps, no approval chains, and replaced them with a single principle: hire adults and treat them like adults.

When people have the right talent, mindset and shared purpose, they don’t need rules to behave responsibly. They need trust. And that’s the thread running through IKEA, too.

IKEA CEO, Brodin, described the “banana card”, a light-hearted token employees can metaphorically cash in when they make a mistake, because mistakes aren’t punishable; they’re part of progress. “The hedge will grow,” he said of bureaucracy, “you need to cut it from time to time.”

That’s organised chaos at scale: structure enough to support, freedom enough to create.

From startup energy to sustained culture

Smaller companies often wear chaos as a badge of honour. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, they’re the lifeblood of entrepreneurial culture. But too often, that spark fades as growth sets in and the comfort of process replaces the courage of experimentation.

What’s fascinating about Netflix and IKEA is that they’ve retained that entrepreneurial energy while scaling globally. They’ve turned what looks like chaos into a deliberate system, a culture of empowered accountability, where people are expected to think, act, and sometimes fail.

It’s a powerful lesson for leaders of any size business: culture isn’t what’s written in the handbook; it’s what happens when no one’s looking.

So, what kind of culture are you building?

If you lead a team or a business, ask yourself:

• Do your systems enable judgment or suppress it?
• When someone makes a mistake, do they feel fear, or freedom to learn?
• Are you building an orchestra or a jazz band?

As Erin Meyer put it, in today’s fast-moving world “the biggest risk is no longer making mistakes, it’s not thinking freshly enough.”

Maybe the challenge for modern leaders isn’t to tidy the chaos, but to trust it. Because somewhere between control and freedom lies the sweet spot where people, and ideas, truly thrive.