3 principles for taming complexity

When the US Military, an exceptional example of robust machinery, process, and efficiency, took on a war with the much smaller, under-resourced and undisciplined Al Qaeda it appeared to be a classic match of David vs. Goliath. But, the networked, fast and renegade nature of Al Qaeda proved to be so unpredictable for the US Military that it rendered it’s size and efficiency an unmatched set of strengths against a unit that embraced speed and chaos in a complex world.

General Stanley McChrystal writes about this exact situation, and how the US Military responded, in his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, and one of his first key points in the book is this — this is not a book about war.

This complex order to the world may have been felt most intimately, and with the most severity, on the battlefield, but it is something that all organizations of people are now facing.

Truly “taming complexity” (which, in and of itself, is a misnomer — at best you can organize yourself to adapt quickly under complex conditions), is a whole subject on its own that requires diving both deep and wide into what contributes to complexity and how it effects people, teams and whole organizations. But, tackling some key principles for identifying and responding to complexity is a good start.

A complex system is defined as:

“any system featuring a large number of interacting components (agents, processes, etc.) whose aggregate activity is nonlinear (not derivable from the summations of the activity of individual components) and typically exhibits hierarchical self-organization under selective pressures.”

As technology accelerates change, and creates opportunity, in every industry on the planet, this complexity becomes persistent and compounding.

In complex environments, I have found three fundamental principles to be most critical in establishing the right conditions for adaptability. Admittedly, they aren’t revolutionary, but retaining focus on these three areas — which are often cast aside as nice-to-haves when planning — may help mitigate larger issues from occurring down the road:

1. Time and space: Complexity and time+space have a highly connected relationship. The more time+space you provide people, the more complexity can be understood. The less time+space you provide people, the more overwhelming it becomes, by orders of magnitude. There is nothing you can take more seriously when organizing teams of people than considering the kind of time+space they have to work together to solve the problem. When you think about time, consider how much focused attention over a duration of time you are enabling for that person or team. When you think about space, consider the physical space the team has to work and also the the license you are giving them to own their work.
2. Decentralize decision-making: When a chain of command is required to solve problems, your velocity and speed is reduced, which ultimately means your agility becomes compromised. Aaron Dignan from The Ready is great at highlighting how progressive organizations seem to be adopting a consistent pattern of enabling “empowered execution at the edge,” and this is something General McChrystal also is a big proponent of. Quite simply, the more complex a situation, the more you have to let those who are closest to the information make decisions.
3. Concentrate communication: If sports are a game of inches, then solving complex problems in a technologically-advanced world is a game of milliseconds. Invest in the technology and systems that allows people to communicate seamlessly and asynchronously, put people close together so that conversations can happen in real-time and whatever you do — get off of email. Complexity requires hundreds, if not thousands, of key decisions to be made on a daily basis. Increasing your rate of decision making, by concentrating communication, can create exponential effect to the productivity of your team.

Bottom line, complexity can never be conquered — as it’s nature is that it’s always changing — however, you can gain an advantage in a complex world by establishing fundamental conditions that set off a chain reaction of good behaviors that are required to adapt quickly and build on positive momentum.