Things were so unpredictable in Comey’s first meeting with President-elect Trump, the former FBI director immediately took notes in his car after the interaction. The president, by asking for a loyalty pledge and crossing boundaries, so destabilized the relationship between the two men Comey reportedly tried to blend into the White House drapery at one event to avoid an exchange. This had ripple effects. The president also destabilized the bureaucratic system. Comey worried that the pressure from Trump to end the Flynn investigation or remove the “cloud” of the larger investigation would “infect” the investigation if he let others working on the case know about it. You don’t need to believe the particulars of each exchange to see that this mode of management was not productive to a larger purpose.

A number of Donald Trump’s supporters told me during the campaign they had faith that he would be a good president because he would be helped by the experts around him. But the president’s improvisation saps experts of their key skill: pattern recognition. Chess masters don’t evaluate all the possible moves. They know how to discard 98 percent of the ones they could make and then focus on the best choice of the remaining lot. That’s the way expertise works in other fields too: Wise practitioners recognize familiar patterns and put their creativity, improvisation, and skill toward the marginal cases.

President Trump has this skill in politics and no doubt in business. But the president can’t demonstrate pattern recognition across all topics, and can’t acquire a lifetime of experience to learn it fast enough for issues he’s never encountered. That’s why he needs experts to be allowed to apply their similar skills. That’s the theory behind his hands-off approach to the military. But where the president does assert himself, he does not simply introduce chaos. He also demands loyalty in response to his unpredictable moves, which asks experts to embrace a move they’ve already discarded as too improbable to ponder. It’s only possible to use pattern recognition if the patterns are not changing after you’ve made your assessment, or as long as someone doesn’t flip the board over and send the pieces rolling under the breakfront.

This week, experts throughout the administration were having their plans scrambled. Department of Justice officials fighting to defend the second Trump order limiting immigration from terrorism-linked countries were undermined by the president’s tweeting. “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.,” he wrote. That’s his justice department he’s talking about there, carrying out his orders. This caused George Conway, the husband of presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, to plead with the president on Twitter to stop undermining his case.