Creating Order From Chaos:
Dr. Evangelina Holvino

Evangelina Holvino, a 2005 winner of the Anna Maria Arias Memorial Business Fund, is president of Chaos Management, Ltd, a consulting, training, and research partnership dedicated to facilitating organizational change and advancing equity in groups and organizations. Chaos Management focuses on learning, collaboration, and empowerment, and its methods involve the clients themselves in identifying, analyzing, and finding solutions to their problems.

For example, Dr. Holvino is currently working with Banco Popular de Puerto Rico to improve teamwork and collaboration with three key project groups. She is also the founder and director of the week-long Hispanic Professional Development workshop, which she has implemented for the last five years to help develop the leadership and career opportunities of Latino managers at Verizon.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Holvino realized the importance and unrecognized potential of the growing Hispanic population in corporate America and the often-overlooked strengths, achievements, and capabilities of Latino professionals. Chaos Management programs, whether in a group setting or an individual coaching session, encourage Latinos to draw on the cultural skills they bring as leaders in their organizations and citizens in their communities and to help them value the unique contributions they can make. In this way, the notion of having to subvert one’s Latino identity in order to succeed is turned on its head.

But Chaos Management does not work solely with Latinos. It also designs and implements a variety of programs aimed at building internal capacity, such as developing skills for trainers and managers in adult learning and group dynamics. For communities and large groups, its staff facilitates strategic planning retreats, during which people with different interests come together to envision and plan a common future.

Describing her philosophy, Evangelina says, “In an increasingly global and fast-paced organizational environment, we aim to respond to the chaos by helping people achieve balance between the need for excessive control that results from our fears of not knowing and the dangerous fragmentation that results from trying to respond to too many demands. Instead, we seek balance between order and creativity and believe that the essence of this balance lies in learning and collaboration.”
Dr. Holvino’s professional path started at the University of Puerto Rico, where she studied education. “My early experience as a teacher grew into an interest in how adults learn and to how individuals work effectively in groups,” she recalls. “When I moved to the United States in 1977, my interest in organizations peaked as I began to experience the complex web of opportunities and barriers that I faced as a Latina professional, from simple stereotypes I did not expect, to lack of access to the power networks [facing] an entrepreneur like me.”

This discovery prompted Dr. Holvino to pursue her doctoral degree in organization development. Though she contemplated an academic career, she was motivated to put her vision into practice in a more tangible way. “When I realized that my research and writing on diversity were well received, I thought to promote my values of equity and social justice in a business environment,” she says. Thus, in 1992, she and her partner James Cumming established a business through which they could accomplish this shared dream.

Though challenging, Chaos Management has proven an exciting place for Dr. Holvino to work towards her vision of organizations where Latinas, Latinos, and others who are not part of the dominant groups can participate and contribute and where partnerships among people of different social backgrounds are forged to achieve change.
Recounting one of her most exciting work assignments since receiving the Anna Maria Arias Business Fund award last September, Evangelina mentions her recent trip to South Africa, where she facilitated a week-long meeting for eight university gender experts to organize into a resource network. “My consulting work has taken me to very interesting places,” she says, “but our work is very much the same here in the U.S.”
Dr. Holvino enhances her organizational work through research, teaching, writing, and informal mentoring. For example, Chaos Management’s workshops on effective collaboration across differences are based on findings from years of practical research on the factors that support and hinder collaboration among people with different roles and social backgrounds.
Dr. Holvino is currently senior research faculty and former director of the Center for Gender in Organizations, at the Simmons College School of Management. Supported by the cash award from the AMABF, Evangelina is now concentrating on her latest project, a qualitative study of the career and leadership development opportunities and barriers facing Latinas in Fortune 1000 organizations.