With increasing speed of communication and global connections it has become nearly impossible for any organization to ignore complexity anymore. Let’s face it, it seems like complexity in life and leadership will only increase in the future. Fortunately, there’s research available about complexity, and we are digging into it at Cairn Leadership.
Complex does not need to be complicated
An airline jet is complicated. It has a lot of moving parts, and they all need to be in the right place. If there’s a problem, you take it apart and figure out which piece is not working. Making mayonnaise is complex. It has a few parts, but each one changes the other so that the outcome is somewhat unpredictable. If there’s a problem, you’ll probably just need to start over.
Complex systems are made of interconnected parts working toward some common purpose. These parts interact in a way that yield unpredictable outcomes. If you ever worked on a team, that should sound familiar.
Complex does not need to be complicated or have a lot of parts though. Instead, complexity resides in interconnectivity. Consider the three-body problem (fun novel here). Mathematicians cannot model the paths of three bodies orbiting each other in space. They unpredictably influence each other. As a leader unpredictability sounds like the enemy, but it’s our new reality and below we cover some opportunities for leaders and organizations to embrace that fact.
How to benefit from leading teams in complexity
Complexity is tough. We yearn for predictable outcomes. As leaders, we would love to articulate a vision with milestones and march along that path to success. We all know that straight path is not reality though.
The good news is that complexity leads to adaptation. Complex Adaptive Systems, let’s just call them work teams for now, can develop novel and useful solutions that the predictable plan could not have allowed in a short amount of time. Adaptability fueled by emergence can save your organization through organic creative responses to rapid environmental shifts – if you let it.
Leaders who enable emergence on their teams can spot and respond to existential threats and opportunities more quickly without any central control.
Emergence leads to rapid innovation
Complexity can create wildly unexpected outcomes, and in a world where teams need to innovate to survive, that’s a good thing. This process is called emergence, and it happens without central leadership. Neil Johnson shares a great example in his book Simply Complexity. If you dropped something valuable in a large crowd, you would find it faster by loudly shouting that you’ll reward whoever finds it first rather than trying to set up and coordinate a search party. A ‘finding solution’ will emerge from the crowd. NASA is trying to use solutions like this to map out Mars, because central control of robots from Earth is not predictable enough and could be far too expensive. With the right initial conditions, using many small autonomous robots could allow a search solution to emerge with no intervention from home.
How to facilitate beneficial emergence on complex teams
If emergence can give you a competitive edge and save you from unknown existential threats, you might be interested in getting more of it. Research indicates three primary ways to facilitate emergence in your organization: interaction, integration, and tension.
Generate more opportunities for interaction
The more people interact the more likely new ideas will percolate into action. We love this new research on the benefits of team offsites (because we offer incredible offsites and know how powerful they are). In my research, organizations also held regular all-hands meetings, found time for team meals, and created cross-functional groups to discuss different topics. One of my favorite ideas was hosting lunch and learns where one department could teach everyone else about its work. There are simple ways to increase connection even in a remote setting.
Leverage complexity by integrating people and teams
Integration can feel counterproductive because it can cause more friction. It is also the most powerful lever you can use in complexity, because it inherently causes tension and necessitates interaction. Integration embraces the interconnected nature of systems.
Some ways you can create more integration include using cross-functional workgroups to solve sticky problems, scheduling in person customer reviews with everyone who touches a product in attendance, or creating intentional dependencies in SOPs. One CEO shared that by having one team integrate with another during the sales process they could better serve clients and sell more services in both departments.
Create constructive tension
If everyone interacts, but there is no tension, few new ideas will form. In their classic article on adaptive leadership, Heifetz and Laurie compare good leadership to a pressure cooker. Not enough pressure and the meat never cooks. Too much pressure and you get an explosion. If you want people to step up and solutions to emerge in your organization naturally, you’ll need to manage tension. Some ways you can create healthy tension include tight timelines, limited resources, diverse teams, stretch goals, and semi-frequent restructuring.
The right structure enables creativity
We tend to think that structure and innovation are opposites. We imagine leaders who create structures would have a hard time enabling innovation and that an innovative environment would tear down structure. That’s not true though. Creativity needs structure to thrive. Sure, bureaucracy can kill ideas, but without a clear box defined, people can’t “think outside the box.”
A key structure to develop is crystal clear mission and values. These enable principle-based guidance instead of rigid rules. Rules kill innovation, but principles promote novel solutions by allowing people to work creatively within guidelines. For example, the famous expensing guidance “Act in Netflix’s Best Interest” is a principle that allows creativity and offers enabling structure.
Building a culture based on clear values and guiding principles will allow your organization to move faster and out innovate your competition. Brush up on drafting a compelling mission here.
