Your ability to flexibly respond to chaos and the unexpected is your number 1 asset; it’s the quality that can never be automated, or codified into a certification program or “best practices” standard that can be easily transferred by rote to anyone globally, independent of actual skill-level and working experience.
A chaosophist is a problem solver, but not just someone identified as the go-to person for a particular class of solutions. As a chaosophist you ride the surf of the problematic and take on anything that comes, regardless of what your role may be. Someone slated as the communal problem solver may have a role that is delineated to solutions within the application you are working with, or the linkages to other applications, but as chaosophist you are the unspecified solution maven who not only tinkers around with the product, the implementation and workflow peripherals, but things like the perceptions the client may have of you and your team, expectations and delays, emotional outbursts or meltdowns of your teammates.
If you are a business analyst or are in any sort of project role, you may already be a chaosophist without realizing it. If you are successfully applying waterfall or spiral methodologies (essentially variations on neo-Aristotelian composition methods) to lived events, you are a chaosophist, and quite inventive, as well. Once you realize the templates are just that, and that you know how to make use of them and get real results, you have increased your leverage and power. You can begin to construct your own methodologies, add a step during the inception where you begin to design your own template out of the things you know, have learned, that is more appropriate to the outcomes you have set for yourself.
It may have aspects of waterfall, and include the cybernetic looping of spiral models (there always is anyway), even the Chaos Model, but there’s no reason to stop there, since you have an entire life of learning and experience to draw from. It’s something you already do perhaps without being aware of the extent of it. You are always inventing, designing, responding and innovating because as 20th century artist Joseph Beuys said, “Everyone is an artist.” He didn’t mean that everyone is Picasso or Rembrandt, but that the worlds we live in demand a high degree of inventiveness from you just to survive and flourish. His dictum “Kapital = Kunst” (art is capital) is a reminder that the true capital of the world is not held in banks and material goods, but in your very actions as you live and work every day.
So continue to go on and think for yourself. Draw on resources from every corner of your life, and add to them always. This process of becoming aware will keep you supple, deft, light on your feet, no matter what happens in the environment. You will be able to meet the challenge. You will be able to redefine what the challenge is, and give it a heart.