I was told, “We need a standard to advance innovation.”
“No,” I thought, “We need chaos.”
That probably sounds reckless to anyone responsible for keeping a building running. Facilities teams live in a world where stability is king. This industry thrives on predictable systems, repeatable processes, and minimal surprises. That’s how we keep our occupants comfortable, safe, and healthy.
But history doesn’t agree
Stability doesn’t create innovation.
Chaos does.
We don’t need standards. We need chaos.
We need lots of messy experimentation where ideas compete, plans fail, and long-standing beliefs evolve.
Right now, buildings are sitting at the edge of that exact moment.
The Pattern: Chaos → Standard → Scale
Nearly every major infrastructure innovation followed the same path.
Chaos leads.
Take railroads for example. Everyone talks about the width of railroad tracks as an example of standards, but in the early days, the United States had dozens of different track widths. Trains couldn’t move freely across regions. Freight had to be unloaded and reloaded when the tracks changed.
This caused… you guessed it… CHAOS.
Eventually the industry converged on a standard track width, but it didn’t come from a committee planning how we should build railroads. It came once the chaos became too much of a burden.
Or consider electrical outlets. Before modern plugs, appliance manufacturers built their own proprietary connectors. Homes had a mix of incompatible plugs and adapters.
Over time the industry aligned around the NEMA 1-15 plug standard, coordinated by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. But the standard didn’t appear first. It appeared after years of competing designs from massive names like General Electric, Hubbell, and Eagle Electric. When the chaos of competition became too great, a standard was welcomed and embraced.
Global trade, same thing. Before standardized containers, cargo was loaded piece by piece. Every port handled goods differently. Shipping was slow, expensive, and… yes… chaotic.
Malcom McLean introduced standardized containers to minimize the chaos. This later became the ISO container standard. Once that standard emerged, global trade scaled dramatically.
The sequence repeats over and over in nearly every industry:
- Innovation chaos increases
- Chaos reaches a tipping point
- Standardization reduces chaos
- Mass scaling
We cannot start with standards. We must first allow the messy, icky, uncomfortable chaos.
Buildings Are Still in the Early Chaos Phase
Facilities technology today looks a lot like railroads in 1850 or electrical plugs in 1910.
We have:
- Competing building technology vendors
- Proprietary protocols and integrations
- Fragmented analytics platforms
- Different approaches to AI and controls
While this feels messy and uncomfortable for those of us in the industry, this is proof that we are exactly where we need to be for massive growth. Every pilot, every failed integration, every experimental control strategy is part of an industry-wide learning process.
We need more of this messiness at a global level.
Premature standards can unintentionally block us from experiencing the discomfort of chaos to the fullest, which would inadvertently hold us back from innovation.
Chaos Avoidance within Operations
Within the built space, we have a culture of avoiding “bad” outcomes no matter the benefits. The risk to reward ratio is skewed almost to the point that we do not allow risk at all.
Rather than running experiments and learning from the failures, we opt for stability.
In industries that innovate quickly, failure is expected:
- Venture capital portfolios often expect six failed investments for every breakout success.
- Pharmaceutical research can test thousands of compounds for one approved drug.
- Even B2B sales may require 100 prospects to produce one customer.
Progress comes from running more experiments, not avoiding them. Facilities treat experimentation as risk rather than learning though. When deployments are overly cautious, we don’t have the chance to include ANY failures, not even low risk failures.
This is the source of slow innovation. It’s not our lack of standards.
Why AI Changes the Equation
Autonomous building intelligence is giving us the ability to experiment in a faster, safer way, with less rick. Systems like Facil.AI allow buildings to continuously experiment with operational strategies, learning from the results in real time.
Although AI solutions sometimes feel uncomfortable because they are different, it’s what we need for the next level of innovation. The experimentation that once happened across thousands of buildings over decades can now happen inside a single building over weeks.
Chaos becomes structured learning.
So Yes, We Need Chaos
Facilities professionals are trained to eliminate uncertainty. But the next generation of building intelligence requires something different:
The courage to experiment.
Because every industry that built global, standardized systems followed the same pattern. Standards don’t come first, no matter how much we try to force them.
Chaos comes first. With enough chaos, standards are the only acceptable outcome. That is when exponential innovation growth will happen.
