On Complexity
I’ve been thinking about writing a post on complexity given a few recent exchanges and here it is. I’m not an expert and there’s a lot of depth and breadth to explore when it comes to complexity research and practice. That’s not stopping our team from trying out ways of thinking and practice that acknowledge the complex systems we’re working in and attempting to influence (see recent posts here and here, for example).
More recently, Abe put out a call for info and is crowdsourcing books, articles, blog posts, courses, etc, so check it out and add your go-to sources.
Abe’s initiative has also sparked a thread of responses. Along with sharing links, people are sharing insights and questions.
Blaise shared his knowledge and experience…
…and Thom launched a challenge:
Mark Foden, complexity and organizational change guide, facilitator, and communicator, including producer of The Clock and the Cat podcast that’s well worth checking out, responded to Thom and noted the difference between what complexity and its implications mean from both intellectual and behavioural perspectives.
This is likely what Blaise was getting at too when he warned of how meta complexity discussions can sometimes be. Mark and Blaise’s comments remind me of my colleague Tera’s observation at the tail end of a workshop that she participated in: as public servants, and particularly those working in policy-related roles, we often attempt to tackle and ‘solve’ things in a cerebral way. Arguably, this relates to how we approach and position ourselves in relation to complex systems change too.
I thought of two options in response to Thom’s ‘one slide challenge’.
Option 1
This one might be too ‘intellectual’, but a table like the one below includes the popular examples of challenges:
- Simple, e.g. following a recipe;
- Complicated, e.g. sending a rocket to the moon; and,
- Complex, e.g. raising a child.
I find the examples helpful in framing the distinctions between the challenge types, but relating them to working contexts would require good explanation, which would take a bit of time. Do the behavioural implications jump off the slide? Perhaps not.
Option 2
Thom could consider using a Cynefin visual like the one below and speak to the different domains, examples, and approaches that are appropriate in each context. Among other things, I added Snowden and Boone’s influential 2007 HBR article, A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, to Abe’s list. It refers to both strategic and behavioural considerations.
Like option 1, with explanation, option 2 could help shed light on how we tend to approach things as if we’re in complicated or obvious contexts. Like, seeing and approaching complex systems as if they’re technical and assuming a complex problem can be understood and ‘solved’, for example. How many times have you heard someone emphasize the need to share “best” and “good” practices as a means of influencing change? The assumption being that what works in one context will work in another. That’s not the case in complex domains. Sonja Blignaut provides a good look at the differences between complex and complicated in her post, 7 Differences between complex and complicated.
Another example comes to mind: behaviours like being in reactionary mode, putting out fires, and top-down direction with little-to-no input strike me as well-suited for chaotic domains. Chaotic situations are actually quite rare though. Curious how it can sometimes seem like we’re managing a crisis on a daily basis…are we really?
Avoiding the meta rabbit hole
I haven’t facilitated or participated in the workshop, but I like the sound of the one Factory 4 Change shares in Innovation, Cynefin framework and LEGO® as a way of learning about the domain differences in practical ways. Like others, I’ll be checking out the courses and training options that people share on Abe’s list and consider them for my learning plan. For example, I added, “Cognitive Edge training” to his doc, and have my eye on the on-line course, Cynefin™ FOUNDATIONS: Cynefin™ and Complexity: managing effectively in uncertainty.
So let’s say, over time, we get a reasonable handle on the differences between the domains and sensing the contexts we’re in. How do we position and apply this stuff in our real life work, particularly if we find ourselves working within and attempting to influence complex systems? On that front, I’ve found a few helpful posts. I find them helpful, anyway. I’ve shared them before so apologies if anyone is getting tired of them…honestly though, I like them so much, screw it, I’m taking back my apology. Here they are again! 😄
It might be helpful to zoom out a bit and then in.
In Towards the idea that complexity IS a theory of change, Chris Corrigan makes the case that “If funders believe that all problems can be solved with predictive planning and a logic model adhered to with accountability structures, then they will constrain grantees in ways that prevent grantees from actually addressing the nature of complex phenomena.”
He recommends enabling the conditions where we approach complexity as a theory of change via the following approach:
• Describe the current state of the system.
• Ask what patterns are occurring the system.
• Ask yourself what might be holding these patterns in place.
• Determine a direction of travel towards “better.”
• Choose principles that will help guide you away from the current state towards “better.”
• Design actions aimed at shifting constraints and monitor them closely.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your principles in changing the constraints in the system.
• Monitor and repeat.
We can also consider the scale of ‘the system’ we’re attempting to influence. Sonja Blignaut shares 7 principles to help organisations resist the siren song of copying recipes, which I find helpful for situating ourselves in our own organizational context:
1. Start where you are. What is possible from here? What is the cultural disposition?…
2. Study the starting conditions that enabled a particular practice or structure to emerge and evolve in a different context:
– if some of those are already present in your own organisation can you amplify them?
– if not, conduct safe-to-fail experiments to introduce some that aren’t currently present, but that seem compatible with your organisation’s cultural disposition.3. Focus on changing the environment, processes and how people interact with them (and each other) vs immediately assuming training people to be different is the solution…
- If you do implement a recipe, make sure you understand the principles behind it and that it…is the starting point for evolving [y]our own practices.
4. Think carefully about copying metaphors from other contexts, language matters and metaphors are powerful…
5. [When it comes to scaling] Resist a one-size-fits-all approach and maintain a requisite diversity. As long as everyone is within the boundaries of purpose, values and organising principles, there is nothing wrong with different areas having different practices.
6. …to scale, think like a chef…breaking things down into smaller discrete units (or ingredients) and allow them to recombine in different ways in different areas (while maintaining coherence through purpose or intent and constraints or boundaries e.g. values).
Zooming in even further, we can think about how we make individual and team decisions. For example, in the brilliant, Cynefin for Everyone!, Liz Keogh shares her experience coaching a government team in applying the framework to inform their decision-making.
I find her “who’s done this before?” question and five possible answers SO insightful:
5. Nobody’s done this before.
4. Someone’s done this, but not in this context.
3. Someone in our organization has done this (or we have access to expertise some other way).
2. Someone in our team’s done this.
1. We all know how to do this.
It makes me think about our default ways of working and our willingness to try new things in new ways. We can consider the question and answers from our individual and team perspectives. I also think about the apparent disconnect between senior executives, who may genuinely want and even call for innovation and change, and those on the ground who are expected to respond, yet, change is either very slow or doesn’t really materialize at the desired scale. It might shed light on the what-seem-to-be-never-ending discussions on how the public sector seems so risk adverse.
As Keogh shares in her post, the 4s and 5s are complex and risky. It’s there though where new value could be created.
“The complex domain is the domain of unknown unknowns. We don’t know what the risk is… but we can be pretty sure that when we do something new, there will be more to discover than our experience suggests.”
Keogh shares the back and forth with the team manager, who comes to the realization that, for the 4s and 5s, it would be best to work on those sooner rather than later, get rapid feedback on them, in order to discover and possibly create new value more quickly. The manager also comes to the realization that that is not how we typically do things:
“Because we love predictability, we tend to try and analyse and plan things, and when we can’t, we leave them till later, hoping that the right answer will emerge. By then, of course, we’ve made a lot of investments and commitments… and if the discoveries we make show us that those investments and commitments are wrong, it’s hard to undo them and turn them around.”
So, usually, instead of embracing uncertainty and emergence, we analyze and plan, or hold off until we’re more certain. This is interesting when we consider the public sector context, and the uncertainty that can come given the democratic nature of our context and the priorities of the day, among other things. That said, along with considering this in relation to a major policy, program or project, it can relate to smaller scale tasks that we’ve never done before within the context of our work, and that are fully within our sphere of control and direct influence to change for the better.
When it comes to public sector change, innovation, and experimentation, where is the new value to be created? Where might we focus and benefit from approaches that are fit for purpose and complexity? The 4s and 5s.
It’s there where we’d likely benefit from a requisite variety of skills and perspectives, enabling trust and tacit knowledge by working together, safe-to-fail experiments (possibly a portfolio of them depending on scope and scale of the challenge), and the other things that Corrigan and Blignaut recommend in their posts above.
Complexity practitioners sometimes refer to safe-to-fail experiments as probes. From my perspective, these probes are similar to prototypes in that they are mechanisms for learning about the complex systems and behaviours that we’re attempting to influence. They are not “solutions”. They are not randomized control trials. They can be part of an experimentation continuum, if we’re open to considering, supporting, and deploying them in context and practice. Keogh, like other complexity practitioners I’ve come across, prefers to enable conditions so that others, who are directly implicated in the complex problem and making things better, can advance probes in their context:
“…it’s very much more powerful when people within an organization can come up with probes of their own. Once change begins happening and people start seeing the benefits, trying new things out becomes an organizational habit.”
She recommends probes include the following five things:
• Indicators of success
• Indicators of failure
• A way of amplifying it if it succeeds
• A way of dampening it if it fails
• Coherence.
Experimentation as a means of action learning & complex systems change
In Towards an experimental culture in government: reflections on and from practice, Nesta reps share a number of reflections that directly relate to the above, including:
• Experimentation as a way of accelerating learning and exploring “the room of the non-obvious”;
• Experimentation as a way of turning uncertainty into risk;
• Experimentation as a way to reframe failure and KPIs;
• Experimentation on a continuum between exploration and validation; and,
• Experimentation as cultural change.
To me, their reflections relate directly to the different domains we’re often working in, including complex systems change. Nesta suggests approaches that can be considered depending on the context and nature of the problems and solutions we’re exploring as a dynamic action learning and change journey. The recent States of Change post, The challenge of innovation pilots also relates to experimentation as a means of learning and influencing complex systems change for the better.
That’s it for now. So much more can be considered, written, and done…helpful as a start though?
Check out Abe’s list of complexity resources for more info!
