Total calm is not a goal. It is the end

People dream of a state in which nothing will shake them any more. No anxiety, no joy, no irritation: a flat, even surface without a single wave. It sounds like an ideal. In practice it is a description of death. A living system cannot freeze in absolute stillness and remain alive. It has to oscillate, because the moment it stops, the boundary between it and its environment simply disappears.

I keep meeting this dream in business. A head office wants a Russian subsidiary that reports a flat line. A manager wants a team where nobody argues. A marketing director wants a channel that delivers the same number of inquiries every week. All of them would be in trouble if they got it.

Homeostasis against homeokinesis

Processes really do tend toward balance. That tendency has a name, homeostasis: a static point that a system keeps trying to reach. The trouble is what full homeostasis means at the limit. If a system is perfectly balanced with its surroundings, there is no longer any difference between it and the surroundings. When the difference goes, the boundary goes with it, and with the boundary goes the system itself as a separate entity. Perfect balance is dissolution.

That is why living systems do not run on homeostasis. They run on homeokinesis: a corridor of oscillation around a centre of identity. A band, not a point. A rhythm that never comes to a complete halt and never leaves certain limits either. The heart beats, the body temperature drifts up and down through the day, attention sharpens and relaxes. None of these is a malfunction. The malfunction would be a flat line. The same holds for a person, a team, a company or a market position: each is held together by the fact that it keeps moving and keeps coming back.

What this does to the shape of the scale

The first casualty of this model is the familiar picture of an emotional scale as a ruler. We tend to imagine a line from zero to maximum: the less agitation the better, and the ideal is perfect, untroubled composure at zero. The homeokinetic model turns that picture over. The correct shape is a corridor, from minus A through a centre to plus A, and what matters is the trajectory of movement inside that corridor, never the bare fact of having moved away from the centre.

Deviation from the centre is not a breakdown. The breakdown is either leaving the corridor or stopping the oscillation altogether. A healthy state is motion inside the band, back and forth, around the centre, rather than being parked at one point.

Apply that to any indicator you are used to reading as a ruler, from a sales team’s mood to a weekly inquiry count, and the question changes. Instead of “is the variance low”, you ask where the centre is, how wide the corridor is, and whether the system comes back after it swings.

An example: the calm that should frighten you more than anxiety

Take a person who has lived for years in a state of constant mild tension and then, suddenly, feels complete, cloudless calm for the first time in a long while. Intuitively it looks like an achievement that was a long time coming. Sometimes it is. But sometimes what stands behind it is not healthy homeokinesis at all. It is movement toward a dangerous edge: the system is so depleted that it has stopped oscillating. That is no longer rest. It is regulation switching off, and it deserves more attention than the familiar anxiety ever did.

On the other side, light and regular swings of mood are exactly what a healthy system should produce: a small lift after good news, a small dip after a failure, a return to baseline within a day or two. The sign of health is waves that stay inside a tolerable corridor and find their way back to the centre.

In business the pattern is instantly recognisable. A client who used to send sharp feedback and now sends nothing at all is not necessarily happy. A Russian distributor who always had questions and then went quiet for a quarter has not necessarily “settled in”. The quiet needs a diagnosis before it gets a celebration.

Why “get rid of the emotion” is the wrong goal

A goal like “never be anxious again” or “calm down once and for all” is unreachable, and it is wrong in principle rather than merely difficult. It contradicts the nature of a living system. To strive for full homeostasis is to strive for a state in which the boundary between “I” and the environment begins to blur.

A more precise goal, and oddly a more attainable one, is not to remove the oscillation but to widen and strengthen the corridor in which it happens. The system should be able to withstand a larger range of deviation without tipping into destruction and without freezing for good. Not silence. A reliable rhythm.

Marketing has its own version of the wrong goal, and foreign companies bring it into Russia more often than local ones do. It sounds like “stabilise the channel”. The execution usually means suppressing variance by any means available: narrow the targeting, cap the budget, freeze the creative. The chart gets flatter and the business gets weaker, because a channel that cannot swing cannot respond, and a channel that cannot respond is slowly leaving the market without anyone noticing.

The Russian angle: a market that runs on homeokinesis

Here is where the model stops being a metaphor and starts being operational advice.

Western marketing playbooks are written for markets that oscillate gently. Platforms stay put for a decade, payment systems do not change, and a forecast built on last year’s curve usually survives. In that environment a flat line is at least imaginable, and a head office can be forgiven for expecting one.

The Russian market has not worked that way in recent years. Platforms that carried a company’s whole funnel left or were blocked, and the advertising stack had to be rebuilt around Yandex, VK and Telegram. Payment and logistics routes changed. Demand moved between channels in months rather than years. Search behaviour, messenger habits and the share of business contact that happens on WhatsApp and Telegram all shifted. A company that sells into Russia from abroad has lived through a corridor far wider than anything in its home market, and often it has drawn the wrong lesson from it.

The wrong lesson is “this market is unstable, so we must impose stability”. That is a demand for homeostasis addressed to a system that runs on homeokinesis. It shows up as a head office that treats every swing as a crisis, budgets frozen at the first dip, and local managers who learn to hide the oscillation rather than report it, because reporting it triggers a panic three time zones away.

The right lesson follows the model. First, find the centre: what the business in Russia actually looks like when it is itself, in volume, in margin, in the mix of channels. Second, measure the corridor honestly: how far things have swung in the past without the business breaking, and how far they can swing before it does. Third, and most important, watch the return. A quarter that swings hard and comes back to centre is a healthy quarter. A quarter that goes flat and quiet is the one to investigate, because stillness in this market more often means depletion than peace. That watching is a weekly job rather than an annual one, and it is most of what ongoing marketing support in Russia consists of.

It also changes what you ask of a local partner. Do not ask them to make the chart flat. Ask where the corridor is, when a swing has left it, and what the return looks like. A partner who promises no surprises is promising homeostasis, and that is a warning rather than a comfort.

What it changes in working with a team and with yourself

The team version is exactly the same shape. A manager who sets out to achieve “an atmosphere without a single conflict” is in fact trying to stop the oscillation. That means one of two things: real processes are being suppressed, or the boundaries between people and tasks are being erased. Either way it ends in an explosion or in lost engagement. A healthy team is not one with no friction at all. It is one where friction stays inside a tolerable corridor and does not destroy the shared work.

For a foreign company this has a specific Russian wrinkle. Direct disagreement in meetings is more common in Russian business culture than many Western managers expect, and the first instinct is to read it as a problem to be managed down. Often it is the oscillation doing its job: the argument is how the team finds its way back to centre. A manager who suppresses it gets a quieter room and a team that has stopped telling the truth.

With an individual person the task is the same: not to avoid ever losing balance, but to return reliably afterward, into your own corridor, around your own centre. That is what resilience is. Not the absence of movement. The reliability of a trajectory that always finds its way back.

Put the three levels together and the practical work for a company in Russia looks like this:

1. Stop grading on flatness. Replace “how much did it vary” with “where is the centre, how wide is the corridor, did it come back”.
2. Treat sudden quiet as a question. A channel, a team or a client that went still has either rested or stopped. Find out which before you book it as good news.
3. Widen the corridor on purpose. Build reserves, keep more than one channel alive, maintain relationships that are not needed this month. Width is what lets the business absorb a swing without breaking.
4. Measure the return. After every jolt, the metric that matters is how long it took to get back to centre and whether centre is still where it was. Research into what your Russian customers are actually going through during the swing tells you more than any flat-line forecast.
5. Report the oscillation upward honestly. A local team that hides the swings to keep head office calm is enforcing homeostasis on a system that cannot survive it.

Total calm sounds like a reward. In practice it is the end of the story. Real viability is not in silence. It is in a rhythm that knows how to return to itself, and in a market like Russia, that rhythm is the only kind of stability on offer.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Полный покой не цель. Это конец