From our book we are working on for apex executives, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘌𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦:
Complexity is a fundamental concept to get your head around to lead in the 21st Century. It hasn’t entered the mainstream thinking in business or society yet, though it is growing. Understanding of complexity is sorely needed to remove some constraints such as the public intolerance of failure which hobbles government and business alike; and to acknowledge other constraints like the impossibility of predicting the future.
You need to fully understand – to “grok” – complexity: grasp the principles and be comfortable with the consequences. It can take many years to learn to dance with complex systems. It is one of the most fundamental shifts in thinking that anyone can make. One day it will underpin all that is taught in schools, as critical thinking does now in Western education (though still sadly lacking in many other cultures). But for now, we need to unlearn and relearn how the world works. Clearly this is a topic beyond the scope of this book. We cover as much as we need to – you will see it peppered throughout. From the authors’ own experience, we can say that complexity can be confronting and unsettling, and it takes years to internalise it, to fully live it. It requires inverting some conventional principles of reality in the workplace, with concepts such as:
🌸 All information is imperfect. Trying to make it too perfect or trying to get too much is waste. The process of gathering information can put a drag on creating value, costing more than it is worth. It is important to know what information is required, and what is good enough. Subjective information (people’s observations and opinions) is often as good or better than objective data: humans have evolved to make sense of complexity. Managers often need to manage without measurement.
🌸 The only way to know is to do: all planning and forecasting is only opinion. Even the most unlikely thing can happen: probability only tells us about trends in something that happens repeatedly. The way forward is to probe by experiment, make sense of what we find, and respond with another step.
🌸 Failure is a normal part of everyday work, and creates a valuable asset. Failure can happen the same way as success. We can do something ten times successfully and have it fail on the eleventh. All our systems are broken all the time. It’s not surprising they fail, it’s surprising we keep them working so often. Failure happens despite the best efforts of the operators.
🌸 It takes energy and resources to force reality to be simple and stable locally for a while, such as in a factory. It won’t always hold. It is expensive and risky to keep it that way in a changing world. We only do it when we have to for efficiency, for repeatability. In most areas of work, we should pursue adaptability not efficiency as our primary goal if we want optimum performance.
🌸 No part of the system (person, process, machine, company…) can be understood in isolation. A system is not the sum of its parts, it is the product of their interactions. The system that is your organisation is way too complicated to ever grasp all of that. The only way to think about a complex system is as a whole, as an entity. In fact they often seem to be alive: they adapt to changing conditions, they have their own characteristics, they develop emergent properties that can’t be explained.
🌸 When anything happens, we can’t know for certain and comprehensively why. Causality is murky. There are always many causes, and every cause has other causes, all the way down to fundamental physics. So we can never be sure we have prevented a recurrence of an incident. The next time will be a different combination of factors anyway.
Because none of us were taught this from childhood, it sounds intuitively wrong. It is easy to reject it. But science and mathematics have comprehensively shown that this is a deeper and more accurate understanding of reality than we had in the past. In practical terms, it is a better way of thinking about the world that allows us – and our organisations – to survive and thrive in the VUCA conditions which are increasingly around us. So we don’t just recommend taking yourself on the journey to understand and accept and internalise complexity – we say it is essential to being an effective leader.