Understanding complexity

A short primer on why complex systems require different ways of acting and making decisions

A few years ago, as I was managing a growing team, I set out to try and understand why traditional forms of management didn’t feel appropriate. I went deep on group dynamics, psychology, and human development theory, and started to piece together different parts of what felt like a very big puzzle.

Throughout my reading, the concept of complexity kept coming up. On the surface, it made sense: everything pertaining to the evolution of the human experience is tangled up in a web of cause-and-effect; resulting from — and leading to — increases in complexity.

Hunter-gatherer tribes became early civilizations, which became industrial nations, which then led to the network age. The internet, mobile networking, AI, automation, and increasingly distributed workforces, all contribute to the complexity of today’s workplaces.

So sure, the world is more complex; therefore it probably makes sense that we need to manage our organizations differently. But what does it actually mean for something to be more complex…