Some days, I think we forget that all leaders are producers of strategy and consumers of strategy. Some days, I also think we forget that complexity makes execution more difficult.
There are two patterns of change and there are two kinds of market conditions. They fall into the categories of complicated and complex. For example, a car engine is a complicated machine. An expert mechanic can take it a part and reassemble it without changing a thing. The car is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts.
On the other hand, a rainforest is complex. The rainforest is in constant flux, and the weather patterns change regularly. Animal species change or go extinct. Local agriculture impacts its water. The whole is far more than the sum of its parts. Most of what we understand about the rainforest, we understand in retrospect.
If we step back from the daily operational problems, we realize that we are dealing with more and more complex organizational changes and complex market conditions.
When it comes to dealing with complexity, I like to use the metaphor of routes and destinations. When thinking and planning strategically within a complex environment, are you asking your people to:
- take an old route to an old destination?
- take an old route to a new destination ?
- take a new route to an old destination?
- take a new route to a new destination?
Answering the above questions will help people think through how to proceed through complexity.
At the Winter 2021 Roundtable, I shared that resiliency is the new efficiency. This is is based on two important points. First, the unpredictability of complexity is not going away.
Second, efficiency focuses on systems and systems make everyone do things the same way each time.“The problem with systems is that they depersonalize and standardize everything And people do not, on one level, like to be standardized,” notes Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe in their book, Managing The Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2007. As they explain, “The essence of resilience is therefore the intrinsic ability of an organization (or system) to maintain or regain a dynamically stable state, which allows it to continue operations after a major mishap and/or in the presence of a continuous stress.”
As they also point out, the hallmark of a resilient organization is not that it is error-free but that errors don’t disable it. Resilience is a combination of keeping errors small and of improving workarounds that allow the system to keep functioning.
This week, think about the differences between complicated and complex. I also encourage you to ponder how to make your organization more resilient.
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