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Entropy and SEO work: how to leverage it to find opportunities

Written by: Noah Learner Tags: jobs-career

Published: Apr 28, 2025

Takeaways:

• Entropy is the default.
• Fighting chaos to bring order to is a huge opportunity for organizations.
• Continually creating order means you can unlock compounding amounts of time you'll have to spend solving different problems that others.
• The only chance we have at saving the systems in life that matter most to us is to use more energy in organizing and maintaining them than the forces of decay, chaos and disorder.

Last Sunday while shaving off my ski season beard I broke the faucet handle in my sink.

Which was really ironic because in that exact moment I was thinking about entropy and how all systems fall apart.

"Entropy, at its core, is a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness of a system." - Encyclopedia Britannica

"Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary." - Shane Parish

All systems move towards chaos and disorder

Think about the room you cleaned 2 days ago. It's probably already a mess.

We must actively maintain systems for them to stay relevant.

Amount of chaos determines how much effort we have to put in to change a system + create order out of chaos.

We must work together to solve big problems. I can solve small problems, but if I want to fix something big it's going to take legions of folks.

"Entropy is the universe's tax on time. The constant battle against entropy is the driving force behind much of what we do. The constant struggle between order and disorder is the source of change + progress." - Shane Parish

Order and consistency are the competitive advantages at work

Think about how much chaos there is at work.

• Systems and processes decay over time.
• People forget the rules.
• We don't ask enough questions to effectively solve the problem.  
• People do things "their own way".
• Communication systems break down.
• Layoffs happen.
• Less people are tasked with doing more within systems that have often been poorly maintained over time.

Sound familiar?

If all systems tend towards chaos, what do we do?

In chaos there's opportunity for competitive advantage for ordered minds, systems + organizations. 

And it's not about starting or creating, it's about applying consistent effort over time.

While entropy is seen by Parish as nature's tax, I see it as a massive opportunity.

Here are some ways to unlock those opportunities:

• Start with the question, "What are my systems and processes for how I and our org do our work? (Eeeeeek... do we have any?")
• Prioritize which systems to target with the following questions as a lens:
  • "Which processes have the biggest impact on the success of our organization, each department, and each line of business?"
    • Optimize, improve, rebuild, and continually train your teams on these impactful systems you've identified.
      • This is necessary because the nature of the problem or thing that we created a system for changes over time as it tends towards disorder.
      • The energy you spend here will likely drive the largest compounding impact over time.
    • Address each system change by assessing:
      • How much energy is necessary?
      • How much input is necessary to make the change?
      • How many people?
      • How much time? How much money?

Leverage points

1. The first leverage point is being able to see the opportunity.
2. The second point of leverage is actually creating the systems to counter the chaos.
3. The third point that most orgs don't execute well on is keeping applying energy over time.

If few people see the chaos, fewer plan for it, fewer execute the systems, and fewer maintain the systems over time, the amount of orgs you're competing with over time is actually quite small.

Systems are always evolving

Are systems + processes locked down? Nope.

According to Bryan Cox (In a segment of "Leaders of the universe"):

In the life of the universe, just as in our lives, everything is irreversibly changing.

That means our systems + processes need to continuously evolve in order to meet the needs of the present and future.

AIOs, AI Mode and industry changes

We don't know exactly what will happen, but we know that directionally our future looks like it will include:

• AI driven change across industries.
• LLMs will drive business our way. We already see it in our analytics.
• Buyer journeys are happening in a single longform chats. Hat tip to Renee Bigelow.
• Learning how to optimize our businesses (and our marketing) so that we can be surfaced multiple times in the same conversation will position us as the trusted source or solution provider.
• How quickly this will matter to our business's survival and health is a function to how fast search experiences + user behaviors change.
• Developing the skills to work with LLMs will be most important.
• Understanding LLM limitations, learning how they work, and how to influence them feels important.
• I also don't know what that looks like as LLMs become more and more personalized (see Chat-GPT's new memory expansion to include all of your logged in chats as part of its context).

There's one way to guarantee failure and that's not learning AND experimenting with LLMs.

Big systems need big energy

If you want to make big changes it will take the concerted involvement of a lot of people.

When I think about the impact I want to see happen in the world (making the world kinder and more empathy driven) and specifically in how we SEOs treat each other online, I realize we'll need a whole lot of us rowing in the same direction to make an impact.

Gratitude

Thanks go out to Renee Bigelow, Chai Fisher, Mircea Vlaicu, and RP for sharpened the focus on how business systems decay over time.

-Noah 2025-04-27