Leadership in a Complex World

Learning from nature and natural systems

Ian Abbott Donnelly ()

There is a common tendency to consider organisation as machines since it gives us a sense of control when we bolt together the components and begin to predict the outcome of our efforts. This mechanical metaphor has worked well in situations that are simple and stable. People know what to do and can get on and do it without fear of much changing.

However, other insights are more useful when an organisation is complex and its environment is constantly changing. Increasingly we are able to learn from the science of living systems since they operate in a complex environment and have the ability to adaptive to produce some incredibly resilient organisations.

Nature’s complex adaptive systems are all around us:

  • Weather systems
  • Ecologies
  • Embryos
  • Nervous systems
  • Immune systems
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Insights from the scientific study of natural systems can help us understand what goes on in human organisations, this knowledge can help us improve they way we deliver improvements, the way we interact and our ability to respond to the challenges of customer demand and competitive pressure. By allowing people to see through the complexity and reveal the inherent patterns and behaviours the energy of an organisation can be focused on productive outcomes rather than struggling to make sense of dynamics that display strange logic.

High on the agenda of many leaders is the need to improve agility, communication and delivery. Insights from Complexity Science can provide valuable new thinking and new practice in these three areas by creating the language and mental models to evolve with the changing environment.

Of course these concepts overlap and interact strongly. This paper aims to bring specific aspects into focus, to explain the relevance of complexity and to begin to its application.

Agility

“Agility” is having the faculty of moving quickly; to be nimble and active. Its the capacity to evolve with your changing environment.

To be successful in a competitive environment an organisation needs the ability to implement changes more efficiently and effectively than competitors.

This is not an aim in its own right, just an important strategy to enable sustainable success.

Organisations are agile when they have:

  • Fast, effective modification of operations
  • A capacity to deal with unanticipated problems and opportunities
  • The ability to rapidly re-deploy resources and adjust structures
  • Speed, grace, dexterity and resourcefulness
  • An attitude of managing the unexpected as a strategic asset
  • Shared purpose, beyond the immediate task process
  • A refusal to be trapped by the success of the past
  • Uninhibited dialogue, feedback, and open constructive contention
  • High tolerances of ambiguity

Ideas That Matter for Agility

  • Self-organisation
  • Heedful interrelations
  • Tuning to the edge
  • Mental models

Self-organisationSelf-organisation is possibly the most important idea for enabling agility. In a complex changing environment where new solutions need to be created this offers a highly intelligent and responsive way of developing. In a traditional organisation it is common for a few at the top of an organisation construct strategies, policies and plans aiming to focus the organisation on the solution that will deliver results.

Unfortunately this top down, command and control approach has some serious limitations – the information they are working with is often historical and summarised, and the amount of brainpower and diversity of views is constrained simply because small numbers of people are involved. When the solution does emerge it is often late, cast in stone because of the seniority and lacks the resilience gained through diverse input.

Self-organisation by comparison is about creating the conditions where order can emerge. The aim is to find order that is dynamic, which can respond to current conditions and change rapidly as they unfold. It aims to maximise the use of intelligence, resources and diversity in the organisation.

Based on the study of natural systems self–organising behaviour emerges when organisations:

  • Are sufficiently populated
  • Have a population that is far from equilibrium and
  • Are properly interconnected.

The interactions that result from this connectedness then create new order

Self-organisation is visible in many places from molecular chemistry to jazz groups, from flocks of birds to technology networks. However, our tendency is to stifle this natural behaviour by imposing detailed controls in the human organisations we create.

Proteins network into cells
Cells network into organs
Organs network into organisms
Organisms network into societies /

The key principle is:

‘Interaction of simple parts, which are networked together’.

A single ant, a single brain cell or a single Internet computer is not very useful, however a few million connected together with a few simple guiding principles can do amazing things. This self-organising behaviour, known as emergence, is one of the fundamental dynamics driving evolution in the natural world.

Most organisations have too little information flow, too little diversity and too many differentials in power to enable self-organisation. For agility it is vital to create the conditions for self-organisation. Command and control organisations are simply not fast enough or flexible enough to cope with a rapidly changing environment.

An agile human organisation does however throw up some issues.

Agile organisations are by definition impossible to control. They are, however, possible to lead. Instead of giving commands you need to give meaning, vision, feedback, purpose and space. This lets self-organisation work. The important concept for leaders is that control is replaced by feedback. Feedback is the thing that enables dynamic stability and dynamic stability is what creates resilience in changing conditions.

What constitutes a valuable employee in an agile organisation is worth highlighting. In a traditional command and control organisation value is created through holding authority, distributing resources and gathering information. However in agile organisations it is different, they share resources and information, and constructively challenge authority to find better ways of working.

One of the reasons agility is less than it could be is that the hierarchy of a ‘mechanically minded’ organisation chart there is no box for a ‘hyperlinked’ worker – that is someone who knows how to get things done, where to find knowledge and who has a wide range of collaborative relationships. These roles do exist in many organisations. However they often operate in the informal shadow organisation. (For more an explanation of the shadow organisation see the Communication section)

Heedful interrelations

Heedful interrelations are when people begin to connect with each other on several levels. There is a heightened sense of what is going on, people are listening, observing, sharing and providing constructive feedback. Interactions happen very quickly, trust abounds and you even begin to get predictive collaboration. Heedfulness can be viewed as group intelligence.

Many field sports such as football, cricket, hockey or rugby rely heavily on heedful interrelations. Imagine how poorly a team would play if they were organised on the lines of a business project team. The experienced players would spend most of their time in meetings, before passing the ball players would exchange numerous emails and the team tactics would be described by a set of boring bullet points in PowerPoint.

Here are some practical measures to maximise the amount of heedful interrelation are to:

  • Create a simple common purpose that is clear to all the participants
  • Enable people to work together on issues, rather than create fragmented responsibility
  • Share stories - both aspirations of success and insights into challenging issues
  • Take care of newcomers - help them learn and value their perspective
  • Seek to combine experience and innovation
  • Encourage distributed leadership at all levels

Heedful interrelations may at first seem like a soft skill, possibly even a luxury in the incessant business world. It is however studies have shown that it is one of the essential skills in harsh and demanding organisations where high reliability is essential: e.g.

The busy flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
Imagine the crew operating in a rough sea, under hostile conditions, with the radar switched off and with many lives at risk. Heedful interrelations are essential to maintain effective operations in this dynamic environment. /
The tight grouping of an orchestra.
It is the heedful interrelations between players and conductor and among the players that can turn a technical performance into a stunning masterpiece. /
Tuning to the edge

Most organisations, from small teams to large corporations display complex behaviour. They need to constantly adapt and re-organise themselves to respond to an ever changing business and social environment. If they change too little they become non-competitive, if they change too much they fall into the instability of chaos where demand exceeds capacity. It takes careful observation and reflection to understand where they are on this graph and so be able to tune the amount of change in the right direction.

Agility is about ‘Tuning to the edge’: at the edge, beyond stability, but not so far as chaos. /
/ ‘On the Edge’
/
Placid Lake -
Stability / Planing Sailing Boat -
Complexity / Crashing Waves -
Chaos

The important thing for leaders is that ‘on the edge’ it only takes small changes to produce large effects – this non-linear effect is a very valuable tool.

In stable situations small changes produce small effects and it is only through huge effort that large effects are produced.

In chaos the effect of both small and large changes is lost in the turmoil; huge amounts of effort and energy produce few constructive results.

Therefore taking an organisation to the edge is a very productive place to be. It is both a creative and adaptable place to be. The reason small changes produce big effects on this edge is because the connectivity and interaction enable emergent behaviour that feeds back on itself cascading and multiplying throughout the system.

By contrast rigid approaches that focus only on efficiency produce organisational machines with no ability to adapt, little ability to learn and no capacity to fix themselves. One slight change in its environment and the effects can be catastrophic to the organisation.

Mental Models of Individuals

In a human organisation everyone is an individual – free to act in ways that are not predictable. An individual’s action changes the context for those around them. This combination of personal mental models, independent actions and dynamic interrelations makes what happens in practice highly complex.

I like the story about Michael Parkinson (the chat show host) which illustrates the way people can pick up different mental models. At a dinner he was seated next to an American lady who he had never met before; they got on well and began talking about many different subjects. Eventually they began talking about cricket, a passion of Michael Parkinson’s. Since this was an unfamiliar sport for the American she asked all kinds of questions that Michael was very happy to explain. They became engrossed in the detail of this quaint English sport: the tactics, the equipment, the language, and the etiquette. The conversation unfolded over about an hour before it was time to leave the table. The American lady added one last comment about her new found interest in cricket: ‘Gee… and they do all that on horseback!’

It must have been a wonderful mental picture in the ladies head.

Individuals operate according to their own mental model of what the organisation is about - their own set of rules for interpreting and responding. These rules are not explicit and may not even look logical to others.

Fortunately people can share mental models, even if sometimes it is a little inaccurate. This is an important mechanism for an organisation to learn. It is these shared mental models that allow powerful co-ordinated behaviour to emerge.

The interconnection of individuals sharing mental models creates great potential for agility. As new understanding ripples through an organisation a small change in one place can have a significant effect overall.

There is however a paradox. Coherence in mental models is important but so too is diversity. It is the interplay of these two that enables agility.

In situations of complex change things are far from equilibrium and therefore the insights of Complex Adaptive Systems become useful.

Individual mental models are the key to understanding. You don’t see something unless you have the right metaphor to make sense of it.

To enable agility, organisations need to create high levels of knowledge, a willingness to share, and constant feedback processes. Unfortunately these are not things that are often found on organisation charts and rarely found in corporate strategy papers. Organisations often have the vision and the resources to enable change but not the internal dynamics to be agile.

Agility Summary

To improve agility an organisation needs to look beyond its static assets, resources and formal structure to develop the dynamics of the organisation. It needs to embrace the ideas of self-organisation, heedful interrelations, tuning to the edge and constantly sharing mental models to enable agility.

Delivery

…the ability to create sustainable order.

Leaders are constantly being challenged to deliver; be it products, services, customer satisfaction, innovation, revenue or cost savings.

In a world that changes little, a mechanical command and control approach can produce effective delivery. However as the environment in which an organisation operates becomes more complex then command and control can often result in little more than large amounts of activity. Because detailed budgets, plans, policies and job descriptions are easy tasks we sometimes never get beyond these to improve how the real work gets done. The result is often that the paperwork becomes ‘it’ – there is lots of activity but little delivery.

Living systems are masters of delivery in complex dynamic environments. By understanding how living systems enable order to emerge, we can counter the tendency of our human organisations to wallow in disorder.

Delivery is particularly useful for human organisations since it is often the source of credibility, funding, personal fulfilment for workers and delight for customers.

Organisations deliver when they:

  • Can respond to the changing aspirations of the stakeholders
  • Have processes that go beyond the simplistic optimal solutions
  • Create the capacity to direct resources to where they are needed
  • Maintain an attitude that is constructive and open to alternatives

Ideas That Matter for Delivery

  • Delay
  • Fitness and Exploration
  • Flocking
  • Paradox
Delay

Delay in an organisation is a significant problem for delivery. Not so much because a delay means delivery happens slowly, but because it disconnects the processes and the feedback loops which in turn produces large amounts of complexity. Even a very simple organisation can be thrown into chaos if delay is introduced.

Imagine trying to drive a car where there is a delay between the steering wheel and the road wheels (see diagram). The delay means that your responses oscillate between under-reaction and over-reaction. This constant inaccurate adjustment in direction will mean you waste a lot of energy, and the quality of driving will be poor.

The lesson for delivery is to look for sources of delay and systematically work to eliminate them. The aim is to connect the processes and feedback loops by allowing them to use the same information source.

In the many cases delay can produce a vicious feedback loop where a initial small delay results in actions that then produce even more delay.

By taking out delay, an advantage is that speed is likely to increase. Though this is useful, the more important reason for taking out delay is because it is a source of complexity which can quickly amplify and create negative effects. Think of the knock on consequences of a delay in a rail journey, or a flight or some medical treatment - all kinds of complications occur for both service operators and customers.

A great deal of confusion, frustration, misunderstanding, over-reaction and tension can be avoided if you can take out the delay in a system. Without the effects of delay, delivery is much more achievable.

Fitness & Exploration: The hill climbing trap

As organisations become successful they often loose the ability to explore their environment and this can have a significant impact on delivery. They fall into the trap of ‘hill climbing’ – that is, always trying to go further up the same hill; the hill being the known solution that has brought them success.

In a complex environment with many hills (i.e. many possible solutions) this single ‘hill climbing’ strategy is likely to produce results that are far from the best - you only ever get to the top of theone hill you are on. When faced with a complex changing environment some resources need to be directed at exploring other hills that may prove more productive. There is risk in exploring because other hills may not be as good, however natural systems demonstrate that this often has a much greater chance of delivering results.

A mental picture of a competitive environment might be imagined to look like a physical landscape where the peaks represent successful places to be. This is often known as a ‘fitness landscape’

Single peak
/ / Multiple peaks

A single peak represents when conditions are well known and stable. In a complex environment there are many peaks and these peaks come and go over time influenced by emerging trends in technology, regulation, resources and education – the landscape is dynamic.