Have you ever thought about why humankind has successfully traveled to the moon, but companies still have a hard time figuring out how to grow faster than the competition? That we can make interventions using nanotechnology, but struggle to turn around the performance of a business unit? Or that we can build robots that perform delicate surgical operations, but we still can’t find a way to provide good and cost-effective healthcare?
The most significant challenges leaders face today are complex in nature. They are issues like doubling the growth of a business, transforming a culture, offering a world-beating consumer experience, complying with new legislation, or stemming an epidemic. The problem is that leaders try to solve these highly complex challenges as if they were merely complicated, and that’s a problem.
COMPLICATED VERSUS COMPLEX
Challenges are either complicated or complex. Complicated challenges are technical in nature. A watch or a car engine are examples of a complicated system. They are causal systems that are linear and can be broken down into parts that can be diagnosed and understood; they can be predicted. They may have many parts to them, but people with the right expertise can usually understand them and they can be fixed.
If you take your watch or car to a repair shop they can run a diagnostic. It might take some work, but they can isolate the problem, create a work plan and usually fix the problem.
In organizations, this is the world of root cause analysis, diagnosis, standardization, work plans & implementation, and conventional management was designed to solve these kinds of problems.
Complex challenges, on the other hand, require innovative responses. Weather, traffic… or a six year old. These are examples of complex adaptive systems. They are dispositional in nature, meaning they have a general direction they’re going, but we can’t be sure how they will develop or change. Complex systems (like complex goals or complex work) can surprise us. They have an emergent property to them. They evolve and are not predictable, so we can’t change them the way we want.
Complex systems cannot be fixed, they can only be managed. No one can fix a garden. You can’t fix the weather. You can only influence them, which requires you to engage in continuous interaction with the system or challenge to learn what works, for whom, under what conditions.
Understanding this distinction is at the heart of where we see things breakdown in organizations. We think what’s happening in many organizations today is that leaders are approaching complex change/problems using complicated or causal tools and approaches, and that sets them up for failure. We see it all the time:
- Diagnosing survey results and creating work plans to improve employee engagement
- Developing recommendations and creating committees to execute plans to improve equity and inclusion
- Teams using root cause analysis on unstructured (non-repeatable) processes to come up with solutions to improve their operational performance
- Constructing work plans, timelines and milestones for strategic goals that have no known pathway or solution (i.e.- improving customer experience or any examples already given)
Organizational leaders are battling wave after wave of complex change. Most organizations aren’t ready for this, because their founders didn’t design them to be. Using causal approaches to complex problems/change aren’t workable or sustainable and they end up causing more harm to those we are trying to do right by. At iF, we are on a mission to help you understand this difference because it will accelerate your ability to affect change. But it starts with identifying whether a problem is complicated or complex, and understanding that you can’t solve every problem with linear thinking.
