navigating complexity overview
TRANSCRIPT
2017 Bernhard Sterchi
Navigating Complexityin teams and organisations
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It’s inadequate, but it’s all you’ve got.
Is this Complexity I’m Dealing With?
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Today, complexity is at the base of everything - and expanding fast! For example…
• Digitalisation has lead to an explosion of information. Not availability, but relevance filters are the prime constraint now.
• Industry 4.0: the combination of sensors, the industrial internet, and big data, push the limits of efficient production. Mass customisation, the reduction of batch sizes, decentralised production and the combination of product and service make it nigh impossible to keep an overview.
• Even at a small level, complexity is the currency of the day: the behaviour of a team in a shop or a project, the way processes and prescriptions are being interpreted, or the impact of an abundance of possibilities on our own daily productivity - it’s complex.
Complexity as the connectedness and co-evolution of everything makes change affect us quickly and easily. At the same time it is almost impossible to effectively impose a desired direction. We are victims of our habits. As such, we underestimate how fundamentally different our approach needs to be when we move from order to complexity. Whoever produces results with an organisation feels that pressure every day. First attempts at adequate responses, such as Agile software development, and experiments with new forms of decentralised organisation, incorporate some methods based on understanding complexity. But they are often linked to specific environments, and while the methods may be effective, people often lack to customise them, and integrate them into their own approach.
Complex is the new SMART
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Remember SMART objectives? They are one of many practical approaches that we’ve come to rely on as the common toolset of management. They are easy to learn, give good guidance, and produce results – as long as the world is sufficiently predictable.
Now, with the world gone VUCA, we need to change fundamentally. If we cannot know today what outcome will be the most relevant at the
end of the next period, smart objectives are no longer accurate.
The science of complexity has come up with a number of approaches to understand complex systems and act in them - but their focus is theory, not practice. People like Stafford Beer and Dave Snowden have developed more practice oriented approaches - but often their focus are large, anonymous systems which justify elaborate methodologies.
Palladio are taking these approaches one step further for the use of everyday management across the organisation: in the form of the Complexity Manager's Compass, a set of principles, activities and tools.
The approach is novel, and the underlying mindset needs getting used to. But it can be learned, and put to practice without further assistance. As easy as smart objectives.
The Nature of Complexity - If you kick a ball, it is complicated to calculate it’s trajectory. If you kick a dog - it’s complex…
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Stable cause-effect relations
Under same conditions, things repeat the same way
Many drivers affect the system
without being affected by it
Evidence can be traced back to one explanation
Models and simulations can predict system behavior
ORDER
Shifting dispositions and patterns, messy coherence
Nothing happens the same way twice except by accident Agent-system coevolution: Most things that affect the system, are heavily influenced by it
Evidence supports contradiction
No prediction is certain
Complexity
Contextual Management in ordered vs. complex environments
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Define the desired outcome
Listen to expertise in order to find what’s true
Plan from the end point
backwards
Make happen what you know to be successful
Understand the big picture and exhaustively manage everything
Make sure nothing goes wrong
ORDER
Define the desired orientation
Listen to diversity in order to find what’s worth trying Respond to the present environment
Let happen what you assume to be promising Have an idea of the big picture and selectively manage the next possible step
Make sure it’s not bad when something goes wrong
Complexity
Management as a Profession
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Principles, tasks and tools of management, by Fredmund Malik based on Peter Drucker
Seeing management as a profession, as Peter Drucker has
done, has a substantial pragmatic advantage. A profession
contains a set of principles, practices and tools, that can
be learned. Management is the profession of creating
results with an organisation. This approach makes the
concept of management less threatening (”What do I
have to know? What do I have to do?”), and clarifies
substantial disorientation (e.g. taking management
for business administration, or reducing leadership
to talent, traits and buzzwords).
Here’s the classical management wheel by Fredmund
Malik, based on Peter Drucker. However, it
insufficiently covers the complex domain. We therefore
propose a Complexity Manager's Compass as part
addition, part replacement. Since the complex domain is
less well known, we would add an underlying framework, and
we change practices to activities, for management is no longer
what the manager does, but what happens in the system.
The Complexity Manager’s Compass
8FrameworkActivities Principles
Obvious
Complicated
ComplexChaotic
Distributedintelligence
Resilience
Small objects
Alignedautonomy
Remove filters
Nudge foremergence
Explore complexity- exploit order
Make sense
Manage constraints
Experiment
Manage by vectors
Facilitaterecovery
Principles Activities
The Compass represents the essential of what one
needs in order to navigate the complex domain. Behind
it are over 60 practices, together with appropriate
didactical support, to help managers address complex
challenges. The end user of the Compass is anybody
who wants to produce results with an organisation (e.g.
line manager, supervisor, project manager, scrum
master), as well as people who consult and coach
these end users.
Using the Compass
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3 Days Agenda
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Day 1: Understanding Complexity
Day 2: Making Sense and Orientation
Day 3: Developing the Organisation
Where proven practices fail:
The nature of today’s management challenges
The Manager’s Compass:
Explore the principles of navigating complexity
Decision making, ordered and complex
Elaborate context-based decision making methods
What is complexity?
Explore and understand the complex domain
Scan the present, expand the possible Sense for the evolutionary potential of the present
When objectives don't work, try heuristics
Manage by vectors and rules of thumb
Dive into the Cynefin framework
Map participant’s contexts on the framework. Identify fields of action.
Aligned autonomy The emergent power of orientation in step by step problem solving
Absorb complexity
Translate between order and complexity along your value chain
Date June 6-8, 2017
Time 9 a.m. - 4.30 p.m.
Location 1100 Chemin du Malvan 06570 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France
Faculty Bernhard Sterchi, Palladio
Price CHF 1650.-, excl. VATDiscount for self-payers.
Included Location, coffee, lunch.
Register through www.palladio.net
Course Details
Bernhard Sterchi, Palladio Trusted Advisers, Gerbergasse 30, Postfach, CH-4001 Basel, +41 78 783 72 44, [email protected], www.palladio.net