In the winter of 1961, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz wanted to rerun a weather simulation. To save time, he restarted the model midway, typing in a value from an earlier printout: 0.506 instead of the full 0.506127. He went for coffee. When he returned, the forecast had diverged so completely it looked like weather from a different planet.
The difference was less than one part in a thousand. The outcome was unrecognizable, and this rounding error changed science.
Lorenz had stumbled onto what we now call chaos theory and the principle at its center: sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In 1972, he gave it a more memorable name with a talk asking whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.
Organizations are chaotic systems too. Markets shift, teams turn over, and strategies collide with reality. In my experience scaling more than fifteen organizations, the most consequential initial condition in every one of them was the same: who sits in the leadership seat.
Every Leadership Hire Is an Initial Condition
A résumé tells you where a leader has been. It cannot tell you how they will behave when the forecast breaks. Yet most executive hiring still leans on the résumé, a handful of interviews, and a gut call.
Small differences in how a leader is wired compound. A slight tendency to dismiss bad news becomes a pipeline built on hope. A slight tendency to chase every new idea becomes a team with twelve priorities and no traction. Twelve months later, the organization looks like Lorenz’s printout: unrecognizable from what was planned.
This is why, as a Hogan-certified practitioner, I use the Hogan Assessment as a pre-hire leadership assessment. Hogan measures personality through three lenses:
- Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI): the bright side, or how a leader shows up on a good day.
- Hogan Development Survey (HDS): the dark side, the leadership derailers that emerge under pressure, fatigue, or boredom.
- Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI): the inner compass, or what drives a leader and the culture they will build.
Together, they let you measure the initial conditions before you commit to them.
Curiosity: The Instrument for Reading Chaos
If chaos is unavoidable, the real question is which leaders can navigate it. Across my work with CEOs and boards, one behavior consistently separates leaders who harness chaos from those consumed by it: curiosity.
Curious leaders treat turbulence as information. A lost deal becomes a question about the buyer. A missed quarter becomes a question about the model. They do not need certainty to act. They need understanding, and they go get it.
Curiosity is not a single score in Hogan, but several scales map to it directly:
- HPI Inquisitive captures imagination, openness to new ideas, and the appetite to explore how things could work differently.
- HPI Learning Approach reflects how much a leader values learning and staying current, and whether they seek new knowledge or rely on what worked before.
- MVPI Science reveals the drive to understand why. Leaders high on this motive prefer data to assumption and analysis to anecdote.
When these align, you have a leader who reads the system rather than reacting to it.
When Curiosity Becomes the Chaos
The butterfly effect cuts both ways. The same curiosity that reads chaos can create it. Under pressure, curiosity tends to either overextend or collapse, and the Hogan Development Survey shows how:
- Imaginative: ideas arrive faster than the team can execute them, and strategy becomes a weekly reinvention.
- Mischievous: testing limits becomes the point. Rules get bent to see what happens, and trust erodes quietly.
- Skeptical: curiosity curdles into suspicion. Questions stop being about learning and start being about catching people out.
- Cautious: curiosity shuts down entirely, and fear of being wrong replaces the desire to find out.
Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone hiring: derailers almost never appear in a sixty-minute interview. Candidates present their bright side because that is what interviews reward. The dark side shows up in month four, when pressure arrives and the honeymoon ends. By then, the butterfly has already flapped.
The Strange Attractor: Curiosity Needs a Container
Lorenz’s work produced one more image worth borrowing. Plot his weather system over time and you get the famous Lorenz attractor: a path that never repeats itself, yet never escapes its bounds. Infinite variation inside a stable shape.
That is the leader you want. Exploratory, but anchored.
In Hogan terms, the boundaries come from HPI Adjustment, the composure to stay steady when results swing, and HPI Prudence, the structure and follow-through that turn ideas into execution. The MVPI values profile gives the shape its center of gravity, defining what the leader will protect when everything else is moving.
Curiosity without a container is chaos. Curiosity within one is strategy. The Hogan Assessment shows you which one you are hiring.
Sam Palazzolo
Operator. Investor. Educator. Enterprise Value Strategist.
Scaling Organizations. Maximizing Enterprise Value.
