Cracking Complexity

NOW - The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything, From Anywhere, Fast

David Komlos, David Benjamin

• Publisher: John Murray Business
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781529376098
• eBook ISBN:
  9781529382815
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

Complexity has met its match!

Today, every leader and organisation grapples with unprecedented complexity. Some thrive in these situations while the vast majority do not.

Now updated for a post-Covid world, David Benjamin and David Komlos share their cutting-edge, highly-engaging step-by-step formula for rapidly cracking incredibly knotty and important challenges, by involving and mobilizing all the right people-no matter where they are-to co-create solutions.

Filled with compelling stories and advice distilled from years of experience applying the Complexity Formula across a broad range of sectors, Benjamin and Komlos have delivered the defining handbook for current and future leaders.
Fully updated to include highly successful and proven virtual methods and practices that have been used to solve real problems. This book serves up the mindset, steps and skills that you and your team will need to crack complexity, wherever you are in the world, so that you can find clarity and build momentum even in the most uncertain of times.

CHAPTER 1

Journey into
the Unknown

YOU PROBABLY routinely encounter daunting complexities in your work. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a not-for-profit executive, a sports team manager, or a feature film studio exec. A slew of head-spinning problems confronts you. You’re trying to achieve an ambitious objective and the paths keep shifting in a volatile environment. You’re executing a major change program and struggling for sufficient traction. You’re attempting to mount a response to a growing number of incredibly agile competitors who always seem one step ahead. You’re trying to pick up the pieces during and following a global pandemic.

The challenges before you feel overwhelming in the best of times and impossible in the worst.

The good news is that they don’t have to be either. Complexity is challenging—in fact, it is the challenge—but the challenge can be met, and fast.

We know this because complexity is what we do. We help a wide variety of organizations and systems solve knotty problems. We help people and groups unravel the knots using the Complexity Formula that we’ll share with you in this book. The results come with unprecedented speed and traction. Novel answers emerge. Turning points happen. It doesn’t matter how confusing, multifaceted, or fast-changing the challenge is. Any complex problem, creative challenge, or highly ambitious goal can be achieved very quickly, given the right approach.

We’ll give you the Formula, step by step, but first we’d like to put complexity in both a historical and philosophical context to help you understand our perspective.

Toffler, Beer, and Hollywood

In 1970, Alvin and Heidi Toffler published the book Future Shock, in which they coined the term “future shock” as a personal and societal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time.”¹ In that same year, Stafford Beer, an obscure genius in the even-more-obscure field of management cybernetics, gave his inaugural address as the president of the Operational Research Society and said:

No one can any longer say whether mankind can survive. …

Man is a prisoner of his own way of thinking and of his own stereotypes of himself. His machine for thinking—the brain—has been programmed to deal with a vanished world. This old world was characterized by the need to manage things—stone, wood, iron.

The new world is characterized by the need to manage complexity.

Complexity is the very stuff of today’s world.²

Why are we referencing two thought leaders from the 1970s? Because “too much change” and complexity as “the very stuff of today’s world” define our realities now more than ever. And because Stafford Beer is the one who laid out the initial version of the Formula that we’ve evolved into what you’ll read about here.

Many people have heard of Future Shock; almost no one has heard of Stafford Beer and his contemporaries. Both Toffler and Beer were warning of complexity at a time that was exponentially less complex than today. Organizations and societies faced change, but those were simpler complex times. Personal computers didn’t exist yet. Millennials wouldn’t be born for another few decades. Consumers bought things in local stores. “Digital” was a term that referred to clocks that were easier to read. Amazon was a river, Apple was fruit, and Google wasn’t a word.

Leaps Forward in Large Groups

We’re far from being the first ones to recognize that complexity is a huge challenge. Our heritage includes some of the names we mentioned earlier. And over the years, other people and organizations have created a variety of approaches that in isolation and in combination have come to represent the conventional wisdom of how to approach, in part or in whole, complexity. These include in no particular order:

•Agile

•Lean Six Sigma

•Experience centers

•Whole system change

•Scalable learning

•Sprints

•Management consulting

•Design thinking

•Systems thinking

•Change management

•Storytelling

•Online communities

•Crowdsourcing

•Idea management software

•Collaboration software

•Call-an-expert

•Expert councils

•Innovation centers

•Scenario planning

•War-gaming

•Strategic foresight

•Etc.

The inventors and practitioners of these approaches have learned important truths about their subject. For instance: to examine things from 360 degrees; to leverage data; to allow ideas to gain steam before dismissing them; to foster collaboration; to put the user, or the customer, or the stakeholder at the center; and so on.

The Complexity Formula draws from some of these approaches and from complexity science, but what’s different is that it’s focused on mastering the challenge of orchestrating large groups of people fast and with whole outcomes, where others have not. We’ve focused on engineering how to give large groups the capacity to sense exponentially, absorb exponentially, and think exponentially so that they achieve exponential leaps forward in thought and execution.

Why put the focus there? The answer lies in the red deserts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Santa Fe Institute

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) began with a series of casual transdisciplinary workshops led by leading academics. The first workshop on complexity was held in the summer of 1986. Operations remained fairly informal until John Reed, the soon-to-be-CEO of Citicorp, reached out to convene a brainstorming session on understanding international finance as a complex system. Reed wanted to understand why Citi’s highly capable economists were unable to foresee a major downturn in the Latin American economy. That session led to the creation of a complexity economics program and accelerated the study of complexity sciences at SFI.

Today, the institute hosts a range of projects dedicated to problems in complex systems science, from collective computation to big data and social networks, to thermodynamics and biological systems, and to scaling sustainable cities, all aimed toward the mission of understanding the “shared patterns in complex physical, biological, social, cultural, technological and even possible astrobiological worlds.”³

As SFI defines it on its website, “complexity” is what “arises in any system in which many agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments.” “Agent” simply means individuals or groups that engage in activity. What makes a system complex is not the presence of many agents, but the fact that these agents adapt to and interact with one another in a way that creates unpredictable consequences. Because the behavior of each agent is dependent on another, each agent’s action offers opportunities for further interactions, creating complex feedback loops that evade easy analysis. In complex systems, the behaviors of agents cannot be simply “summed” up, for the “whole is more than the sum.”

In his introductory book to complexity, John Henry Holland, pioneer of genetic algorithms and University of Michigan professor, provides as an example of a complex system a commodities market where agents buy and sell, adapting their strategies as market conditions change, leading sometimes to “bubbles” or “crashes.”⁴ For Holland, understanding the interaction of adaptive agents is critical to solving some of the most important problems of the twenty-first century. These adaptive agents and their interactions are at the core of complexity.

Whether it’s SFI or any of the practitioners of the methods and approaches we listed above, untangling complexity in human systems ultimately points to a need to rapidly and efficiently involve, tap into, and force interactions amongst a large cross section of these agents, which in human systems means people. This is the requirement that becomes the biggest (not the only) determinant of success or failure.

The Plight of the Hero

To suggest the magnitude of complexity’s impact today, let us draw an analogy to the movies. In the 1970s, Hollywood created many disaster movies about sinking ships, burning buildings, crashing airplanes, exploding zeppelins, plunging elevators, earthquakes, avalanches, floods, nuclear meltdowns, tidal waves, and hurricanes. Each film was about a survival threat to an isolated group of people—each one depicted a single disaster at a time. In most of them, a hero would save the day by making a superhuman effort and rescuing some of the others who survived the initial disaster, and eventually life would return to normal.

The disaster on the screen brought about a complex situation, but each was a one-at-a-time event that could be dealt with and was over by the time the credits rolled.

If today’s complexity were depicted in one movie, we’d have simultaneous earthquakes, avalanches, floods, nuclear meltdowns, tidal waves, and hurricanes, each compounding the effect on the others, with all of humankind getting stuck in sinking ships, burning buildings, crashing airplanes, exploding zeppelins, and plunging elevators; all while a global pandemic rages. Then the aliens would arrive, and a meteor would strike. And it wouldn’t end; the disasters would keep coming with accelerating frequency and severity. To get out of this mess, we’d require many heroes, and each would have to become continuously stronger, faster, and smarter to keep up with the mounting disasters. And they’d all have to work together effectively.

We are living in times that are far more complex than even Toffler and Beer could have foreseen. Unfortunately, the vast majority of organizations still approach complexity as if it were the 1970s. They know better—but they still try to deal with problems one at a time and in sequence. They still act as if survival is just a matter of getting off the plane or the elevator or the zeppelin and getting on with business as usual. They still embrace the tenet that you have to “go slow to go fast.” The results range from bad to a disaster.

Meet Our Three Heroes

Dealing with complexity these days is like the hero’s journey trope in storytelling: a hero is shaken from his or her comfortable day-to-day existence, embarks on an adventure, ultimately wins a decisive victory, and then comes home changed or transformed. Except here, the hero is an organizational leader, the adventure is overcoming a complex challenge, and the victory is the achievement of clarity and action that puts the hero and the organization on a new path with the complexity mastered.

We’re going to be following the story arc of three heroes who are composites and archetypes constructed from real people and situations we’ve worked with. We can’t use actual names and business cases because those are confidential and central to highly competitive situations and core strategy.

Our three heroes are meant to collectively cover business and non-business situations, challenges, and opportunities, dealing with internal and external dynamics, partnerships, and ecosystems. Each narrative is important for understanding concepts, instructions, and the experience of executing both.

Here are their respective organizations:

1.Plesius Finacorp, a global financial services company trying to get the most from an enormous partnership

2.Doregan, a global consumer packaged goods conglomerate fighting to remain ahead in an increasingly declining industry

3.Micbern, a health system struggling to align and mobilize diverse stakeholders in the state in order to tackle the mental health crisis

We’ll be talking about these three individual “heroes,” along with others from their respective ecosystems, throughout the book. But first let’s eavesdrop on their thoughts.

1. Brenda, SVP of finance at Plesius Finacorp, financial services company

I can remember the day that I realized it.

It was my second year of working here. I spent my first year trying to understand the business of Plesius Finacorp and financial services in general; I came over from a media giant, an ent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Cracking Complexity Now
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• A Note from the Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Journey into the Unknown
• Chapter 2 Getting Started
• Chapter 3 A Picture Worth 418 Words
• Chapter 4 Step 1. Acknowledge the Complexity
• Chapter 5 Step 2. Construct a Really, Really Good Question
• Chapter 6 Step 3. Target a Requisite Variety of Solvers
• Chapter 7 Step 4. Localize the Solvers
• Chapter 8 Step 5. Eliminate the Noise
• Chapter 9 Step 6. Agree on the Right Agenda
• Chapter 10 Step 7. Put People on a Collision Course
• Chapter 11 Step 8. Advance Iteratively and Emergently
• Chapter 12 Step 9. Change How People Interact
• Chapter 13 Step 10. Translate Clarity and Insights into Action
• Chapter 14 The Payoff
• Appendix A Where Else?
• Appendix B Troubleshooting
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• Copyright