Complexity and Simplicity: Why We Succeed or Fail

When we experience success, it often feels like we have delivered something essentially simple. When we fail, it feels like being tied up in confusion. Big initiatives are complicated eco-systems with multiple moving parts, people and motivations. If Complexity and Simplicity go hand in hand, what are the circumstances that determine success or failure when dealing with them? Why is it important to understand them?

Complexity

As I’ve experienced it over the years, we encounter complexity in one of these two human-centric scenarios.

A) Success: a team comes together to design sophisticated solutions to audacious challenges involving multiple, evolving variables;

B) Failure: a team falls apart because there’s neither clear direction nor political will and antipathy between the key actors is rampant.

When things go right — when NASA re-engineered Apollo 13 on the fly to bring it home, when Apple designed the first iPhone, when political resolutions to major conflicts are achieved — no matter how tough the challenge or arduous the collaborative processes involved, it is togetherness amongst participants and shared ownership that change the world and shatter old constraints.

When things go wrong — think of any number of major and minor calamities over the years — you’ll quickly identify lack of direction, resistance, bad planning, false starts, bad morale and even fraud.

Important: Good Organizational Design

Projects succeed or fail at the most foundational level: the organization. The way we work — and have worked for the last twenty or thirty years — is being challenged by the emergence of agile methodologies, millisecond analysis, the 24-hour information cycle, new definitions of value (not just growth but sustainability) and new ways of thinking. Yet our organizations often don’t reflect that. HR organizations are still largely rooted in rigid, hierarchical models. The working population today stretches across three very different generations: the Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials. Each has a very different set of expectations of life, work and value that range from the highly ordered (Baby Boomers) to the highly flexible (Millennials). X’ers tend to be in the middle somewhere.

When it comes to managing complexity successfully, it helps to have clarity around the following four organizational design objectives:

1. What are we solving for? We need to be able to articulate the challenge clearly and have a well designed strategy with short, medium and longer term objectives that build on each other. This includes shared responsibility for strategy and operations between designers and makers.

2. Do I have the right talent across the organization? The very first thing we should do when embarking on a new plan is audit the talent everywhere in the organization. People are the biggest determinant of success or failure. Know everything you possibly can about your team before making any organizational moves. Unlock hidden talents or jettison the jerks.

3. Is my Organization designed for success? With the speed of development, ideas and knowledge discovery today, we can’t be trapped in rigid structures that reflect technology and business structures from the 1980s and 1990s. If you’ve discovered where the pockets of talent are in your team (per #2), unleash it and give it room to breathe, even if that means breaking existing hierarchical structures. Design for success!

4. How is our Culture doing? We don’t all think the same way. Review people’s track records, relationship-building skills and motivations. Set goals, don’t micro-manage, welcome different ways of thinking and make it your mission to be inclusive — embrace diversity!

If your organization is designed for clarity of mission, openness to change, collaboration and shared responsibility — “we win and lose together” — then a huge number of barriers to success are removed right at the outset.

When Things Go Wrong

One of my favorite stories of dysfunction, if a little obscure, is the story of British Rail’s Advance Passenger Train (‘APT’) from 1977–1986. The APT was slated as Britain’s answer to Japan’s sleek Shinkansen bullet train and, closer to home, France’s TGV. The design objectives, drawn up by a committee of bi-partisan politicians, business leaders and engineers detailed a long list of utterly unfeasible goals. One example: they sought to build the world’s fastest train network utilizing existing track from the 1920s; both the French and the Japanese had understood the need to invest in entirely new infrastructure to succeed. All the other non-feasible environmental requirements built into the project meant that only a ‘eureka’ moment could make this project work. It came in the form of a ‘leaning’ mechanism. If the train could ‘lean’ into the bends on the track, it could pick up enough speed to overcome the aged rail infrastructure. Late 1970s software didn’t work consistently enough to pull this feat off and the project was scrapped in 1986 out of fear that trains approaching each other from different directions would collide if there was a software error. This article is a fun read about what a complex mess the project became wholly due to political intransigence and lack of direction.

You can have the very smartest people engaged in a project, but nothing will be accomplished where there is antipathy. On the surface, things seem complex because we’re not looking at them the right way, or they involve change that some people do not buy into. This leads to fiefdoms and micro-cultures challenging the mission which, if unchecked, will lead the efforts to failure.

Pointing the Finger

When the finger of blame is pointed at complexity, some of the most recognizable signs of failure are:

Fear someone in a position of power is not listening and threatens to pull rank, with personal consequences for anyone with an alternative view;

Lack of Incentive There’s a lack of recognition or skills or resources or a plan. This leads to fear, frustration, and a failure to launch;

Lack of Political Will Stakeholders aren’t willing the project to succeed;

Lack of Decision Making The vision is incomplete, causing poor communications, incomplete feedback and a bad decision-making process;

Lack of Investment Someone in power loves boot-strapping and isn’t invested. Lack of skills and resources results in frustration and a lack of Incentive.

Failure through Complexity arises when immovable perceptions meet unstoppable change. It prevails in overly hierarchical organizations that ignore respect, collaboration and simple motivation. Any number of corporate charters, values and cultures will fail when the management culture is definitively top-down and the employee culture is ‘them v us’. These companies are characterized by a customer culture that is ‘inside-out’. Inside-out? That means there’s no real exploration with customers to understand what innovation should look like. It leads to things like the Pontiac Aztek.

Does that sound too simple? It should be simple: the politics of human motivation is always at the root of success or failure. There’s an interesting meme about the Cold War that posits that the conflict was essentially about control: the US won because it exerted control by allowing people to dream of freedom and individual achievement. Meanwhile, the Soviet model promoted the collective good over the individual: that’s a much harder sell.

Simplicity

I remember when I was learning to surf, I was frustrated by how difficult it was to stand up. Then one day, another surfer told me to “stop gripping the rails” — the edges of the board — with my hands. Instead, he told me to press my hands down on the face of the board and push up when I could feel the momentum of the wave. In one swoop, I not only moved fast enough to jump up at the critical moment, but I also learned how much extra power was in the muscles below my elbows and in my hands and what a difference it made to use these. As a novice surfer, I would never have figured this out. It was the simplest difference in technique, yet completely altered my experience.

The thing is, getting to simplicity in itself is not a simple process. Moving my hands from the sides to the center of the board actually unleashed an entirely separate set of motors and energy and gave me an exponential amount of lift. And so it is, if we want to design simple and engaging products or processes that really work,

“The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental. Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging,” says [Apple’ Chief Designer, Jony] Ive. “Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you’re not aware really of the solution, you’re not aware of how hard the problem was that was eventually solved.”

This is essential reading. For simplicity to “pervade every part of the process,” there can be no ambiguity about the vision, the mission, the brand or the organization. Whatever hidden forces that are invoked to keep these four powers in line are the determinants of success or failure when it comes to solving complex problems.

When Things Go Right

This is a SHORT list! There are Four key determinants for success in working through complexity and they are:

Culture: when it’s open, engaging and collaborative

Objectivity: when there are no immovable perspectives

Assertive Leadership: the power to negotiate and inspire

Appreciative Inquiry: the ability to determine change collectively

Any complex challenge can be tackled when flexible minds engage in transformation. To paraphrase Steven Johnson at the most simplistic level, it’s where good ideas come from.

Defining Success

Definitions of Complexity and Simplicity from several sources come out roughly as:

Complexity: something that is hard to understand and is not simple

Simplicity: something that is easy to understand

Further refinement of the search will lead to many articles that explain how complex processes lead to simplicity. Voila! Both Complexity and Simplicity are complex and yet, when successful, simple. So it’s a complex yet simple debate. For my money, complexity means lots –and I mean lots — of simultaneously moving parts and people and all that entails. So the determinants of success and failure are rooted in human motivation and ability to manage.

If you’re a strategist, Complexity becomes an exercise in Integrative Thinking, or connecting the dots, fully understanding opposable forces as well as supporting ones. Maybe you visualize these through mind-maps or design workshops with lots of colored post-it notes, iteration and rapid prototyping. The very best strategists have the humility to engage with people whose areas of expertise will impact the strategy positively and accommodate that thinking. Good strategists respect their teams and don’t micro-manage minute parts of the process. We live in a world where the known, the known-unknown and adjacent ‘unknown-unknowns’ can largely be solved for or at least imagined with incredibly insightful and collaborative solutions like Big Data and Design Thinking, amongst others. Three dimensional modeling, predictive insight and repeatable, scalable processes allow for the creation of brand new things and new value through new and existing investments. New primary and secondary revenue streams are enabled because we approach change and insight with an open mind and a will to inspire appreciative inquiry within organizations — and their customers. If an organization is not investing in those methods, that right there is the root of future and avoidable ‘complexity’. It is all driven by how people react to three simple questions:

· Are they listening to me or not?

· Is this culture the right fit for me or not?

· Are they selling to me or engaging me?

If the answers to these three questions are positive, then almost any complex challenge can be made simple and we will succeed in herding all those moving parts and people. If not, it’s simple: we fail.