The world is riddled with wisdom. No surprise I stumbled on the work of Dee Hock,
the founder of Visa. His philosophy, coined as “Chaordic” (a blend of chaos and order), offered a radical system upgrade
for how we view organizational control.

Hock’s core thesis is that organizations must blend chaos (autonomy and innovation) with order
(structure and control). View this from the point of view of the DevOps team:
they have given teams the power to be autonomous, yet teams are drowning in a fragmented implementation of shared tools.

A. The Illusion of Alignment: Tools are not Standards

Hock’s philosophy highlights a critical flaw in modern engineering: we often mistake “shared tooling” for “standardization.”

A “standardized team” is not just one that uses the same CI/CD pipeline as everyone else. It is a team where the
usage patterns of that pipeline are predictable. Currently, most organizations suffer from “Tooling Alignment,
Implementation Drift.” We all use the same ingredients, but we are baking entirely different cakes.

The Configuration Trap

We have centralized the purchasing of tools (Jira, GitHub, Kubernetes, AWS) but decentralized the governance of how
they are applied.

Example: Every team uses Terraform. However, Team A manages state files locally, Team B uses an S3 backend with no
locking, and Team C has hardcoded secrets in their .tf files. The tool is standard; the engineering reality is chaotic.

Well, we’ll just state the problem here, and try and solve the problem in later posts.

B. Centralized Decentralization: The “Tight-Loose-Tight” Model

Rune Ulvnes provided the ultimate architecture for a software company is the “Centralized Decentralization” model. This is often described in
management theory as “Tight-Loose-Tight.”

  • Tight (Centralized): The Strategy and The Standards. We agree on what we are building and the guardrails of
    how we build it (security, reliability, naming conventions).
  • Loose (Decentralized): The Execution. Teams have the autonomy to iterate, experiment, and deploy features within
    those guardrails without seeking permission.
  • Tight (Centralized): The Accountability. We measure results against the initial standards (Production Readiness
    Reviews, SLOs).

The failure happens when we are Loose on Standards but Tight on Tooling. We force a developer to use a specific hammer,
but we don’t teach them how to frame a house.

In platform engineering, we call this the Golden Path (or Paved Road), which always lacks the discipline of structure.

The problem isn’t that teams are rebellious; it’s that the “right way” is harder to execute than the “quick way.”
Standardization is missing because we haven’t productized it.

Example Problem State

The “Config Drift” Reality. “We want every microservice to have structured logging and standard health checks.”
For most teams, there is certainly a document on how to execute logging, but nobody reads or cares about. Teams copy-paste
code from old projects, carrying over technical debt and deprecated patterns. The tool (the logger) is the same,
but the standard is lost.

The Fix

The Platform as a Product. We must stop writing wikis and start writing Blueprints. Centralized Decentralization
requires a catalog of pre-configured, standardized templates that are easier to use than starting from scratch.

Creative Implementation

If one want to spin up a new service, the “Teaspoon” approach is giving him an empty repo and a Jira ticket. The “Bucket”
approach, Centralized Decentralization, would be an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that says:

“Click here to spawn a Service. You will get a repo with the linter pre-configured, the Dockerfile optimized for
production, the CI pipeline connected to our security scanners, and the k8s manifest using our standard labels.”

By making the standard path the easiest path, you achieve standardization without sacrificing speed.

Final Thoughts

I’ve realized that autonomy without guardrails isn’t freedom; it’s just onboarding/incident anxiety waiting to happen.
It’s time to stop letting the tools dictate our chaos and start engineering our own “Chaordic” order.