From Simplistic Thinking to Embracing Complexity

And then you will hear how this is going to be accomplished. This will involve ‘cascading down’ the new messages and processes. Embracing and communicating the sense of urgency. Rigorous new metrics that will monitor progress. An internal marketing and communication program. Perhaps some new training. Stronger controls. A rebranding. A reorganization (most often a shuffling of existing managers). Possibly a modest devolution of authority (read: more responsibility).

You can’t be blamed for being cynical. You’ve heard it all before. Five years after the last comparable drumroll, nothing has really changed, or if it has, the changes have nothing to do with the last Big Change Project. Most likely, the changes have entailed squeezing more out of fewer people, by downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, doubling-up workloads, cutting benefits, replacing older people with cheaper, younger ones. There’s probably some new technology left over from the change that didn’t help anyone and is now little-used. Profits are up, so the shareholders are happy (for now), but while ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ are up, effectiveness is down: There is no time for anything except routine, grinding work, fighting fires, squeezing customers. There is no time for innovation, for learning, for improving effectiveness. There is no time to think.

Things are the way they are for a reason. The executives and outside ‘experts’ who sponsor all these simplistic over-hyped programs are not interested in understanding this reason. They don’t have the time. They probably couldn’t understand what’s really going on even if they took the time. They care about short-term bottom-line results. Profits. Revenues. Efficiency. Cost reduction. Risk reduction. They don’t care how they’re achieved or whether they’re sustainable. They don’t care about the fallout ñ burned out workers, disengagement, unthinking obedience, lost loyalty, long-term vulnerability, lack of innovation, lack of new skills. The job of the lineman is to hurt the opposition in the very next play, and in so doing make the quarterback look good. What was done in the last play is forgotten, unimportant. What will be done in the next quarter is irrelevant. Block and tackle, do your job, and better keep doing it better all the time or you’re off to the minors. How? Thatís your problem. Just make sure that you do it, and at the same time do what you’re told. Follow the Game Plan. Doesn’t matter if it makes no sense, or if it makes no difference to the game.

The real problem with this lunatic approach to management is that, for awhile, it works. And management is only evaluated on what they do for awhile. Once they retire or get promoted, they don’t care what shambles they leave for the next incumbent. It’s a fiercely political, competitive environment. It’s prevalent in almost every large organization, because it works for awhile, and because if you spend enough time in it, and ‘succeed’ in it, you start to believe it’s the only way to run an organization, and that it’s effective. In fact, it’s dysfunctional, unsustainable, self-destructive, simplistic, unfair, demotivating, and ineffective.

There are ten things to remember about complex adaptive systems (which include all social and ecological systems):

1. It is impossible to know ‘enough’ about such systems to prescribe blanket ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ in such systems: There are too many variables. A one size answer never fits all in such systems.
2. The wisdom of crowds is essential to even a basic understanding of such systems: The more people involved in understanding, thinking about, and making decisions about such systems, the more likely those decisions are to be effective. And that means diverse people ñ including front line workers and even (gasp!) customers, not just larger groups of egotistical muddle-headed managers.
3. Such systems are unpredictable: Because there are so many variables, many of them unknown, it is folly to even attempt to predict what will happen, even in the short term. It is even more folly to reward senior people for having guessed ‘right’ or to penalize them for having guessed ‘wrong’.
4. Many of the variables in such systems are uncontrollable: Big organizations have this crazy belief that they have the power to change markets and processes, when in fact all their billion-dollar ad campaigns do is tap into (or fail to tap into) a latent demand, and their process changes mostly show up only in the procedure manuals and Intranet sites. If they’re actually implemented on the front lines, chances are the ‘improvements’ were already being done unofficially because the people on the front lines already realized their value. And if (as is often the case) the management-driven process change actually makes things worse, the people on the front line will simply find a workaround that makes it appear that they’re complying when they’re really not. Front-line workers are expert at this. What’s really ridiculous is that senior executives and consultants are unfairly rewarded when their changes ‘work’ (i.e. when profit rises in the following quarter) and unfairly penalized when they don’t, when in reality any correlation between the process/program changes and subsequent changes to the bottom line are almost always unrelated, sheer coincidence.
5. In such systems, prevention is difficult but better than a cure after the fact: You don’t need to be able to predict disaster to be able to put in steps to help prevent it. Prevention requires imagination, and unfortunately we live in a world (especially true in large organizations, where imagination is actively discouraged) of terrible imaginative poverty. And when organizations do think about ‘what could go wrong’, their thoughts are almost always mis-focused on external risk mitigation. You can’t prevent disruptive innovations coming from outside your organization. You can prevent all your best people from leaving because they’re underappreciated and disengaged.
6. In such systems there are no ‘best practices’ or ‘best policies’: Every situation in complex adaptive systems is unique. Trust the people closest to that situation to know what to do, don’t try to impose some practice that worked well in some completely different context (though telling a story about that practice might help those closest to the situation decide whether it could be adapted to their situation). Likewise, don’t expect any policy to suit all situations, and don’t insist that policies be followed blindly. Trust (there’s that word again) the people closest to the situation to know what’s best to do.
7. In such systems, great models can spread but they usually can’t be scaled: Most of the huge inept bureaucracies in our world probably started out as effective, well-functioning small-scale experiments. As soon as such experiments get recognized as ‘working models’ (not the same as ‘best practices’, though many people, alas, don’t know the difference), there’s a tendency for them to spread virally, and get adapted to suit different circumstances. That’s a good thing. But there’s also a tendency for someone to try to make them work on a larger (sometimes much larger) scale. If you don’t understand why this almost always fails, re-read Small is Beautiful.
8. There is a tendency for those working in such systems to presume ‘learned helplessness’ of customers and employees: The customer, the citizen, is often viewed as a mere, passive consumer of your organization’s products and so-called wisdom. The employee, likewise, is assumed to be ignorant, stupid and disinterested in the success of the organization beyond his/her own job. Most people don’t take kindly to having their intelligence insulted. And failure to engage customers and employees in co-producing the product is a tragic waste of great opportunity. The key is knowing how to engage them: Not through passive questionnaires or surveys, but through conversations, stories, and presenting the ‘problem’ to them so they can help you appreciate it better and then address it. Learned helplessness is widespread, but it’s an easily curable disease.
9. In such systems, genuine decentralization is almost always a good idea: That means pushing out real authority along with responsibility. It means making a patient investment in people as they learn from mistakes (by patient I mean years, not months, and the investment includes writing off the mistakes as professional development, not penalizing them). It means setting realistic goals, providing appropriate money without strings attached or second guessing, and letting small decentralized units self-manage. The only crimes of a self-managing unit that should result in re-assessment are (a) protracted failure of the unit to collaborate well amongst themselves and (b) prolonged dissatisfaction of customers. And both problems suggest that you have incompetent people in the units, not that the idea of having decentralized self-managing units is a bad idea.
10. In such systems, networks outperform hierarchies: This is a corollary of the other nine tenets of complex adaptive systems. Information, ideas and working models spread faster and more effectively peer-to-peer than up and down hierarchies.

If more of the people who would have us sit through their decks of powerpoint bullet-point slides would make the effort to understand complex adaptive systems, instead of relying on the ‘accepted wisdom’ of management and change management, we might finally be able to start breaking down large organizations, in both the private and public sectors, into small, empowered, autonomous units that actually work. I get the sense that those under 25, and women, get this better than the rest of us. Unfortunately, these are exactly the people who are most likely to get bored, frustrated and disengaged by large organizations, and leave them to the fools that keep trying to implement what has never worked, and never will.