What if I told you the single biggest threat to your business, your organization, your church, or your non-profit isn’t competition, isn’t a lawsuit, and isn’t a recession?
It’s one word, and it’s rooted in science: entropy.
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. The Second Law says the same thing every time: left on its own, a system always moves toward more disorder, never less. Heat spreads out. Structure breaks down. Things come apart unless energy is put back in.
That’s a physics lesson. It’s also a business lesson, a marriage lesson, and a health lesson.
Entropy in human institutions is a slow, sometimes imperceptible degradation of quality, service, and the pursuit of the mission. Nobody announces it. No single day breaks anything. It just erodes a little at a time, while you’re busy doing everything else.
And we see it everywhere, don’t we? Our physical health. Our marriages. Our homes. Our communities. It’s a colossal game of whack-a-mole to keep it all at bay.
So what do we do? How do you fight something that’s written into the laws of the universe?
You can’t stop it. But you can fight it. Here’s how I do it, in three steps.
Step 1: See It Before You’re Far Off Course
You can’t fix what you refuse to look at.
Entropy is dangerous precisely because it’s gradual. You pop your head up one day and realize you’re a long way off course, further than you ever would have let yourself drift if you’d been watching.
So watch. Some of it lives in the numbers, and you should know your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) cold. But some of it never shows up on a report.
Learn to listen for the quiet signs. The gut feeling. The small incongruity. The body language that doesn’t match the words. You know the one. You run into a customer at the grocery store, you ask how the project’s going, and they smile and tell you it’s all great, but something in you says they’re not telling you everything.
I’ll give you a personal one. Right now, I’m losing ground on my weight. It’s as high as it’s been in a while. I only know that because I’m actually looking, logging my food, tracking it, staying honest about the scoreboard even when the scoreboard is uncomfortable. You can’t fight what you won’t measure.
Step 2: Grab the Wheel Yourself
Here’s where I have to be honest about a mistake.
Our organic marketing had been sliding. The engine that used to work stopped working. And when I finally looked hard at why, the answer was uncomfortable, and it pointed right back at me.
Some of our best marketing has always been founder-led. It comes from me, in my voice, and it works because it’s mine. That’s not a task you can hand to someone else. Nobody else can be the founder. And somewhere along the way I got lazy and stopped doing the one thing that had always proven to matter.
That’s on me. Not my team. It was never theirs to carry.
So I took the bull by the horns. I said we’re going to fix this, and I turned it into a quarterly Rock. I started showing up for it again, and the numbers started climbing.
Fighting entropy is an act of ownership. When something’s decaying on your watch, it’s yours. Not the market’s. Not your team’s. Yours.
Step 3: Build the Small, Boring Habits
Bad news, folks: You don’t beat entropy once, then walk away, arms raised, singing “We Are the Champions” at full volume. Instead, you make small deposits, often. Obnoxiously often.
Order is expensive. Disorder is free. So the systems, the body, and the relationships all have to be re-energized on a schedule, not rescued in a crisis.
I’ll use my marriage as an example. What keeps it strong isn’t the big anniversary trip. It’s the small, intentional, repeated things. A monthly date night. Two to four trips a year. The TV off when we sit down together on a weeknight. Dinner as a family whenever we can get everyone in one place, which gets harder every year with two of our kids mostly out of the house now.
Nobody schedules a rescue mission for a strong marriage. You just keep making the small deposits so it never gets to the point of needing one.
Same with my health. Even while I’m losing on the scale, I’ve held a routine that’s working: stretching and mobility work, weightlifting, and pickleball. It’s kept me limber and (mostly) injury-free. The habits hold the line even when the scoreboard has me down in the 4th quarter.
Same with the business. The marketing fix didn’t stay a one-time push. It became a Rock, a recurring commitment, so the attention is scheduled instead of heroic.
Wrap Up
Entropy is constant, and it’s free. It never takes a day off, and it’s always calling you with the sweet siren song of “set it and forget it.”
Order costs something. It always has. The intention should have never been to build the thing once. The work is to fight the decay, over and over, on purpose.
So here’s your one question before you close this: Where is entropy winning right now? In your business, your body, or the relationships that matter most?
Be honest about it. Then pick one small habit, the boring, repeatable kind, and start re-paying the bill this week.
As always, if you’d like to chat about topics like this, I’m here for you: scott@scottmonday.com.
I recently shared my Audacious Guarantee talk with a local Rotary Club. I think it went well. I didn’t curse, which was a win. Check it out!
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What I've noticed in my own stuff is that chaos shows up first in whatever was working well enough that I stopped paying attention to it. Founder-led marketing is a good example because nobody else can do it, so there's no one to catch it slipping. Mine is delegation. Twenty years in and I still hold onto decisions I shouldn't, mostly because I think I've got the best answer, and I'm honestly not sure that's true anymore.