Simple is rarely comfortable

Last week I ran a rewilding leadership class in London using a new format, namely two half days.   It worked well as it gives people an overnight period to absorb what is often disruptive material and allows more social interaction between delegates.   It also works better for travel as it turns out a lot of people had to book two nights for a one-day class and now they have the morning of day one and the afternoon of day two for travel.  So expect this to be the format in future.  I’m going to blog on leadership later this month but if you want a foretaste then Rich Watkins posted an excellent summary a couple of days after the event.

This post is about basic introduction to how to manage in complexity that I have been evolving over the past year, which I used on the Leadership course and a range of other presentations over the last few months.    I want to emphasise the ‘evolution’ aspect of this process:  to make things simple but not simplistic is hard and it takes time.  Far too many people simply grab a concept which is fashionable (and that is now the case with Complexity), then throw together some slides with a set of platitudes based on some previously familiar body of work.  I’m not sure if this is putting new wine into old wineskins or old wine into new, but whatever that approach is a significant set back to achieving real changes in thinking and acting.  It confuses making things simple with making them comfortable.

If you want to skip the following polemic and jump straight to the Explaining the basics section please do

One of the most common ways people are falling into error here is making the whole thing a matter of different qualities that leaders are meant to exhibit to be able to cope with a complex world.  The language is often well written,  poetic and quasi-religious in nature and difficult to disagree with, but it ends up making the individual actor the guilty person: the reason you were unable to manage complexity is that you failed to adopt the qualities the writer is advocating.  As I said, quasi-religious and often associated with a form of Calvinism (the writer is one of the elect) and a healthy dose of guilt is attached to non-compliance. Put simply the qualities are themselves an emergent properties without predictive capability.  Few, if any, are context independent – the platitudes come from trying to create uncontroversial universals

An awful lot of people have jumped on the complexity bandwagon over the last decades, a trend accelerated by COVID.  Some of them, and it’s regretably far from a majority, have done the reading and reflection necessary to create an authentic and coherent approach.  Even if the work has been done then an even smaller percentage have understood the implications for their practice, and of that small group an even smaller percentage are able or willing to make the changes that are needed.  Now this is not to say that there is one right path, but there are different coherent ones.  It’s no secret that I disagreed with Ralph, and now disagree with Chris, on the psychological approach advocated by the Hatfield-based Complex Responsive Process Approach, or for that matter the over-emphasis on modelling in many an academic institution; but I don’t challenge the authenticity and coherence of what they say.  In contrast the discipline required to work in a new field is sadly lacking in many of those who use the language.

I’ve made it clear in the past that creating methods and tools, and by implication communication strategies takes a few years of thinking and reading and then a lot of experimentation.  That means a fair degree of failure in the process but the key is not to compromise in the theory to make things comfortable for your audience, but to try and try again.   So after a decade or more, I’m now starting to feel comfortable with doing the elevator pitch (be it in a very tall building with a very slow elevator) in a manner which doesn’t compromise the core theory behind anthro-complexity but which can lead people into new practices.

Explaining the basics

I’m not writing this as text, but rather as a series of bullet points.   A year ago I had them written down, now they are seared into my brain.  Exactly how the bullets are used will change with different audiences and you have to be sensitive to that – speaking without slides is a lot easier than people think and can help you be more responsive.   I also write key words and phrases with the iPencil on the iPad when with a larger audience.  Writing slows you down and gives the audience a chance to absorb the ideas, flashing slides is less effective.  Of course, speaking without slides means you need to understand your subject ….

1. We live in a world of inherent uncertainty – everything is entangled with everything else – the only certainty is that whatever we do will have unintended consequences
   One can introduce complexity here and talk about dispositions, not causality using the magnet metaphor or similar but that depends a bit on the time you have and the audience
2. Speed of response to emerging possibilities and threats is key, the earlier you see things the better but you won’t see what you don’t expect to see
   At the point speaking of inattentional blindness and the radiologists where 83% don’t see the Gorilla can help and establish the need to find the 17% who do before they talk to the test
3. That means one of the first things you need to do is to create sensor networks capable of real-time feedback and those networks need to be culturally, cognitively etc, diverse
   In this context, the cliché that your employees are your greatest asset takes on a new meaning – for government its citizens
4. In Complexity Theory, there are three necessary but not sufficient conditions for novelty to emerge – more fully explained here.
   This may take a bit of time but I am finding it is important that trying to get people to think holistically in effect provides a cognitive filter that means you don’t spot weak signals until it is too late
5. So it’s fairly simple, we can change the granularity and interactions and see what happens, reinforcing the good, disrupting the bad
   You need to use examples – small groups of people, interactions don’t have to be explicit, material objects and processes can play a part
6. Then not everything can change or be changed and we need to understand what is in play – here I draw the energy/time grid of Estuarine Mapping and include counterfactuals
   I may at this point bring in constructors and constraints but its not necessary
7. Finally what we are doing is managing the substrate – there is little point in deciding what plants you want before you have done a soil survey and checked the irrigation
   There may be other metaphors but that works – and it means you are selling a pre-process before they then do something more conventional (starting with where people are not where you would like them to be)
   

In all of these, I am talking about very practical things that you can put in place, not abstract or ideal qualities.   I know it’s not fully there yet, but it does seem to be working.   In my next post, I will pick up on leadership and tackle the qualities issue head-on.

As a postscript to the above, most of the people I’ve met over the years who talk about making things simple, generally mean making things comfortable for themselves or the people they want to impress.  I remember at one training course I was running with two other people I finished a session which had made people uncomfortable as they were not familiar with complexity and its implications.   I then left for a meeting and one of the other two took over.  By chance, I returned to pick up something from the back of the room to hear them claim simplification and also make things practical (always a red flag) so I stayed and listened out of sight.  All they actually did was abandon most of what had been taught and dumb it down to something terribly conventional.  

This false simplification is an ongoing issue in complexity and often it’s because the person making the claim doesn’t really understand the material or its implications, so they make things familiar and comfortable.   Turning hawks into pigeons is a good clickbait strategy.  These grand simplifiers also confuse the language of communication with that of exploration and also rarely pay attention to the context of exploration.   The level of sophistication in language has to be adjusted to the audience.

One of the reasons I can use the more simple form of the seven stages above is because of all the work I have others have done over the years to get complex ideas over, without compromise.  Something to which they rarely contributed and mostly acted as an oversized sea anchor.   One of these days I am going to start naming names 🙂

The opening picture is of the thousands of manmade objects—95 % of them “space junk” which occupy low Earth orbit. Each black dot in this image shows either a functioning satellite, an inactive satellite, or a piece of debris. Although the space near Earth looks crowded, each dot is much larger than the satellite or debris it represents, and collisions are extremely rare. (NASA illustration courtesy Orbital Debris Program Office, text from the same source.)

The seedling photo in the banner is dropped from an original by Zoe Schaeffer