Category: General Learning

Like many, last spring I became fascinated with the story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Alarmed. Concerned. Sympathetic. Sorrowful.

The flight was an international passenger flight leaving from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and scheduled to arrive in Beijing, China. The flight was lost. Incredulous as this sounds in an age of advanced radar and satellite imagery, the flight was lost. There were 239 people on board.

Did it crash into the sea? Was it hijacked? Was it a terrorist attack? Did it explode? Speculation on news programs ran rampant for a number of months after the disappearance. Though this disappearance led to the largest and most expensive search in aviation history, that continues now, no evidence has been found or shared to confirm any of several possible stories about what really happened.

The unexplained disappearance of this plane strikes me as being rather complex. Without intending to overlook the basic tragedy of 239 lives lost, most likely, there is a key learning for me from this event that is related to complexity. Is is that in complex circumstances, all stories (OK, many stories) remain simultaneously true. There can be much posturing about a preferred story, and the selective attention to data that supports that story, but it remains that all stories are true. None of the stories can be disproven.

Let’s back up a bit and link this to participative leadership.

In the Cynefin Framework developed by Dave Snowden, there is an important distinction between four environments: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.

In a simple environment, one story tends to be true. A causes B. It’s very linear. Little discussion is needed to confirm the narrative. Smoking causes lung cancer.

In a complicated environment, a few stories are true. There is still linearity. A more involved algorithm perhaps, but the narrative is still clear. Smoking increases the chance of lung cancer. So does exposure to secondary smoke. So does exposure to a polluted quality of air.

In a complex environment, all stories remain true. Meaning must be negotiated. Must be a conversation, in which many narratives are relevant and simultaneously plausible. What promotes good health? Yes, of course, exercise. Yes, of course, a proper diet. Yes, of course, rest. And yes, of course, avoidance of habits such as smoking. Despite these many affirmations, in a broad enough conversation, there will be people that know of others living a long, long life despite the absence of exercise, a proper diet, rest, etc. Despite the habits of smoking, and other patterns that correlate with illness and disease.

Most people relate to complex lives. Wether personal lives, at the job, or in leading levels of transformation. One essential need in these complex lives, is the ability to explore the simultaneous existence of many stories being true. It may play with our brains — after all, it is so nice to impose a simplicity — and create significant confusion and frustration. Yet, the essential capacity is more curiosity, not more certainty supported by blustering boldly. The disposition of being able to pause, to wonder — less blame and fix — is what will walk us more meaningfully and productively in today’s plethora of complex environments.

Recently in speaking with an elder friend that I trust, when I asked how she was doing, she responded, “I don’t take any of it too seriously any more.” I know her well enough to know that she takes many things seriously. It isn’t apathy that she was describing. I believe it was the kind of wisdom that comes with experience, and perhaps age, to not get hooked into impositions of truth. I believe it was the kind of tempering that comes with experience to begin to recognize that story, is so often our choice.

The following is a post from buddy Chris Corrigan. It is part of a longer piece, here, that clarifies the relationship between The Art of Hosting and complexity.

One of the things I like in these words is that Chris points to a level of change that is beneath the surface. It is less about a training program, though that too is important. It is more about a change of being, the kind that takes place well after a program, if people maintain their curiosity and commitment to experiment and share learnings.

For me, the pursuit of mastery in the practice of hosting conversations is the way I respond to the complexity that we are facing in the world.  When faced with uncertainty and emergent problems, it is imperative that we engage in collective intelligence and create the conditions for good sense making and decision making.  Working with complexity is a high art, and is in rare supply these days.  Over the past year I have been in many situations where the fear of an uncertain future has caused people to reduce their work to the simplest and easiest problems to solve. Money gets spent, resources get deployed and another year passes, and at best we shift the needle on something in a way that we can never understand and at worst, we erode the collective capacity we have to act resourcefully in complex environments.  And that, I am certain, will be what is written on the gravestone of humanity, should it come to that.  I have no doubt that the statement will be accompanied by a pie chart analysing the downfall.

That is my biggest frame of understanding why these practices are important: complexity matters and we need more complexity workers.

What if complexity were just complexity? Multiple relations in multiple networks of people in multiple timelines that don’t always line up conveniently. As human beings, we try to look for simplifications in our plans. Often, we project our desire for a kind of simplicity onto situations that will never be as simple as we like. It’s a bit like saying rocket science is as simple as a match and some fuel. That may be true at some level, but isn’t particularly useful.

I like this image of Coots, a photo that I took several years ago while in Southern Utah. One of the reasons is that these images of nature, of living systems, remind me, or inspire me, to understand self-organizing systems. It was my friend Margaret Wheatley who spoke a premise so often when I first met her in the early 90s. “Organizations are living systems. Living systems have the capacity to self-organize. What if we were to try to organize human endeavor in the way that life organizes itself.”

This focus on self-organization has much to do with complexity. My friend Kathleen Masters and I are exploring creating a workshop together. We want to give more attention to understanding complexity in complex human systems. At this point we are gathering resources.

One of those resources is from Dave Snowden, the same person that has offered so much on the Cynefin model. Kathleen reminded me recently of a distinction Snowden makes between robust systems and resilient systems. In short, it is that robust systems put a lot of energy into preventing failure. Resilient systems put a lot of energy into making it “safe to fail.”

It seems admirable on the surface, this “preventing failure” approach, doesn’t it. I don’t mind the descriptor of robust. It has typically connoted a kind of diligence, rapt attention, and preparedness. Pretty cool. The contrast in resilient systems is an acknowledgement of the essential experimental nature of complex systems, in which redundant, simultaneous experiments are happening all of the time. And many of them fail. Preventing failure restricts choices and constrains learning. Safe-to-fail expands choices and requires learning.

Snowden offers more on early detection and adaptation, which I think are helpful. But the kicker here to me is that our mindset must shift from an obsession of “get it right” to “adapt, learn, adapt, learn.” The latter welcomes, provides freedom and encouragement, to learn through failures. The former punishes it, which sadly, is common practice in  in management fields.