If my colleagues have to hear me talk about “chaos” one more time, I’ll be eating lunch alone, admits Alyce Gillis, Today The Brave’s head of strategy.
I declared back in January, chaos was going to be my theme for the year. Global conditions made it impossible to ignore, so I even started writing an article about it. But, in the most poetic way possible, chaos got in the way. Seven months later, here I am finishing it – and honestly, it feels even more relevant now.
Because by August, the tidy optimism of January is a distant memory. Plans start to look like crime scene boards; budgets shift; timelines vanish and trends appear and die before anyone’s had time to pretend they understood them.
But this is the exciting part. It’s when the most effective, culture-shaping ideas get made. Chaos isn’t the enemy, it’s the accelerant.
Why chaos works for creativity
Order feels safe, but it rarely surprises anyone. Chaos, on the other hand, forces invention. It’s where structure and disorder meet and magic often happens.
And for someone whose job title is often planner, saying “embrace chaos” can feel at odds with the ultimate job: clarity. But clarity isn’t about eliminating uncertainty, it’s about finding the sharpest path through it. In fact, some of the clearest thinking happens when you’re forced to cut the noise and focus on what actually matters.
As Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trend Hunter and author of Exploiting Chaos, says: “The truly disruptive ideas often emerge during periods of economic uncertainty, when old structures collapse and there’s no choice but to adapt.” Chaos doesn’t just unsettle, it creates the perfect conditions for brave, culture-shaping work.
We’ve seen it in wildly different contexts at Today the Brave. For True North, where travel sentiment and competitor noise were shifting frequently, we built a campaign that could flex with the tide. For News Corp’s mastheads, the news cycle and economic mood forced a content strategy that adapted as quickly as the news does. In each case, the work was braver and more effective because the plan was built to survive change, not avoid it.
That’s not to say every chaos-fuelled idea works. Loud is definitely not the same as effective. Impact isn’t about racking up views in 24 hours; it’s about making work that resonates, moves with culture and delivers something that matters. The trick isn’t to just react to chaos, it’s to mine it for meaning. And when audiences are feeling the same instability we are, work that offers them a spark of clarity, humour, or connection will cut far deeper than any viral stunt.
Creativity thrives under pressure
This isn’t new. Every recession, pandemic or platform meltdown in recent memory has produced breakthrough ideas. Not because chaos is ‘fun’ (spoiler: it’s not), but because it strips away the illusion of control and forces us to zero in on what actually counts: a sharp idea, out fast.
The brands winning right now aren’t polishing the plan they made in January. They’re recalibrating; they’re taking creative swings; they’re trusting their ideas to travel across whatever cultural terrain they land in.
Again, we’ve seen it ourselves with Wendy’s, which we helped launch into Australia’s high-speed QSR market earlier this year. Chaos meant riding meme cycles, sentiment swings, and commentary moving faster than any content calendar could keep up. The win wasn’t in avoiding unpredictability, it was in using it to define the brand’s voice in a new market.
And that’s the point: the brands that thrive in chaos don’t just survive it, they weaponise it. Which is why, as the end-of-year rush hits, there’s no sense wasting energy trying to tame the chaos. Let the mess challenge your assumptions, refine your thinking and push your ideas to places they’d never get to in the comfort of a perfect brief. Because the best work often starts in a mess.
