In 57 BC, Julius Caesar’s army in their second year of campaigning in Gaul was unexpectedly and simultaneously attacked by the Nervii at three different points while part of the troops were crossing a river and another part was setting up camp. In Caesar’s Gallic War commentaries, it was written: “Caesari omnia uno tempore erant agenda.” Translated from Latin, this means “Caesar had to do everything at the same time.”
This is a routine and common experience for people who are leading an organization through complexity. They feel overwhelmed by the number and magnitude of issues and problems that need to get solved, often all at the same time. It is constant, unending, and difficult work. Yet, having spent decades working with people through these situations, I have learned some interesting insights.
First, we need to change our thinking about systems. We default to thinking of them as fixed and unchanging. However, when we step back and look at them with a long view, most systems are constantly evolving. They are, in essence, living. And as a living entity, they need to be responsive to the changing world around them. Failure to evolve would render them ineffective over time.
In the short term, we want most systems to be stable, but in the long term and as they scale up across a widely dispersed, organizational geography, we need to recognize that “equilibrium is a precursor to death,” notes Richard Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja. Surfing The Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (Three Rivers Press, 2000). As they continue, equilibrium “must be assessed in the context of scale and time….prolonged equilibrium dulls an organizations to arouse itself appropriately in the face of danger.” The needs of customers or persons served, and the needs of the company and its employees are constantly changing. Therefore, the systems must evolve in order to meet these external and internal changes, needs and expectations.
Second, with the idea of living systems, complexity, and adaptive challenges in mind, we need to recognize that having a strategic mindset, as noted earlier, means that a leader needs to be an architecture of meaning, helping people to not only be clear, but also to structure their thinking. “All change results from a change in meaning,” writes Margaret Wheatley in her book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Berrett-Koehler, 2005). To achieve a change in meaning over time, we have to think clearly and we need to organize, or in essence, structure our thoughts.
As leaders, we routinely confront paradoxes and wrestle with deep questions about organizational identity and direction. This comes in the form of the following common questions: Who are we? What do we believe in or stand for? Where are we going? How are we going to get there?, etc. The answers are generated from an understanding of the macro and the micro, internally and externally to the organization. So, leaders seek out these answers, recognizing that they will and must change over time. In short, they understand what Kevin Cashman wrote so many years ago, namely “As you believe, so shall you lead. And from my experience, building on Cashman’s insight, as employees believe, so they shall follow.
With the building of structured thought, i.e. helping people put current events into context related to external trends and internal strategic choices and responses, both leaders and employees can work together because they have a shared mindset and a shared sense of meaning. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), remind us: “Instead of cascading goals, instead of cascading instructions for actions, we should cascade meaning and purpose. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced. Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism…. Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they want to be told why.” And with the understanding of why, they can handle complexity and adaptive challenges better.
Third, these same leaders need to focus on decision architecture. Ruth Wageman, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss and J. Richard Hackman in their book, Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes To Make Them Great (Harvard Business School Press, 2008) write that there are four essential tasks a senior leadership team must perform, namely information sharing, consultation, coordination, and decision making. In their article, “Making Judgment Calls: The Ultimate Act of Leadership” in the October 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis point out that there are three stages to effective decision-making, namely preparing to make a decision, making a decision, and executing a decision. From my experience, I would add a fourth stage, namely to evaluate the decision.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her article, “Transforming Giants” in the January 2008, issue of the Harvard Business Review, offers an interesting perspective on decision making after two years of studying multinational corporations, and after 350 interviews on five continents, she explains, “The key, I’ve concluded, is that a decisive shift is occurring in what might be called the guidance systems of these global giants. Employees once acted mainly according to rules and decisions handed down to them, but they now draw heavily on their shared understanding of mission and on a set of tools available everywhere at once.” And building on this shared understanding, i.e. a structured line of thinking, she notes, “In the most influential corporations today, a foundation of values and standards provides a well-understood, widely communicated guidance system that ensures effective operations while enabling people to make decisions appropriate to local situations.”
Now, when it comes to decision architecture, most leaders focus on making decisions. But in the land of complexity, adaptive challenges, and volatile market conditions, the best leaders want to understand how the decisions are being made, not just that they are made. In order to do this successfully, they ask themselves and others key questions: What decisions can I make and do I need to make? What decisions can they make and should they make? Next, they ask: When do they need to share a possible decision with me before they make it? When do I need to share a possible decision with them before I make it? Finally, they ask: Who owns the decision? And who will execute the decision? Who will evaluate the decision and the decision-making process? By answering these questions along with building a shared understanding about living systems and a shared understanding of meaning and context, all involved can move thoughtfully and carefully through complex, adaptive challenges.
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