The Complexity Myth

For various reasons, I’ve spent some time recently wondering why in a business environment getting things done can be so hard. What is it that creates stalemates to progress? Is there some underlying quality that no matter how much we ‘grease the wheels of progress’ only acts to turn such grease into glue? I was once naive enough to think that all that was required to make change happen was determination and authority, but have increasingly realised that such qualities – whilst helpful in ensuring progress – are often far from sufficient.

Though there are people that resist change in all forms almost as a matter a principle, most people will recognise that if something is broken then it needs fixing. The first problem arises when one person sees something they believe is broken and another says it isn’t. The next problem is that even if they both agree something is broken, how best to fix it is often another matter. In organisational terms, both of these problems are a matter of perspective; depending on the job, something may hinder you (and therefore be broken), but help me (and therefore be working fine). Who’s right? The answer is probably both and neither, which highlights just how much of a mess these situations are and can become.

Who was right in the example above depends from whose perspective you chose to look. Both of them are right from their own perspective, and both could be wrong from someone else’s. If we all operated in the same environment and did similar jobs then this would probably happen a lot less, but this isn’t the case and we do work in often complex organisations, doing role-specific jobs in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world. This complexity is often the cause of the biggest problems we face and also, ironically, the biggest reason we find it so hard to solve them.

So having said that, how can this post be titled ‘the complexity myth’? I’m not suggesting the world isn’t complex, or indeed that the problems we face aren’t complex; the reason I say it’s a myth is because this complexity is what often prevents change, not because actions can’t be taken but because people are caught trying to understand a problem that often defies such understanding before they act. The myth is that complex problems are not simple.

One of the most useful things I’ve found in dealing with complexity comes from the field of Systems Thinking. Simply put, complexity doesn’t exist outside of our minds: nothing in and of itself is inherently complex, it just ‘is’. We perceive it as complex, and this labelling makes us think in a certain way. As I have a background in ICT, the inside of a PC are not complex to me; to many of my friends, the inside of a computer is extremely complex indeed! When computers go wrong, I’m often asked to take a look because I’m completely comfortable with this and my friends aren’t. There are two important points here: firstly, complexity is a matter of individual perspective and NOT a property of an object or situation, and secondly, that perceiving complexity alters how people react to and deal with it – it is a label that puts people in a certain mindset. Complexity is difficult; that is the underlying message. Complexity is not simple. Complexity is hard.

This has significant implications for business because it can lead people to produce overly complex solutions (as clearly no obvious solution would work or it would already have been done), or lead to no solution at all because the problem is too complicated. This might be just because they have reacted a certain way to complexity. Trying to solve a so-called complex problem can lead to a kind of paralysis as people struggle to get to grips with everything that might be related to a situation. There seem to be endless possible avenues to explore and consider, and these only increase exponentially as more people get involved and they see additional layers of complexity. At some point, problem solving simply drowns under the burden of over-thinking a situation. The resources expended in these kinds of situations can be truly staggering for remarkably little return; in fact, you might even find that after significant effort people can’t explain why the solution is so evasive. When asked, you might simply hear back “It’s complicated” (I know, I’ve said it like everyone else!)

There is, regrettably, no easy solution to this. Although complexity might not exist outside of our minds, that doesn’t really make that much difference to all of us who have to work with our minds! What can help, however, is not falling into the complexity myth trap: just because something looks complex, try thinking about how it might actually be simple. Ask someone who knows nothing about it to look at a problem or situation; their perspective might help break the myth. Don’t get a committee together, though – more than three people of leads to more complexity than it solves!

Above all else, just because something looks complex don’t accept that it really is; you might just miss out on a very simple solution.

The exponential damage of bad management

Most people can think of ‘bad managers’; the boss that didn’t know their job, couldn’t manage staff properly, never listened, didn’t communicate effectively and so on. The same goes for managers thinking of former (or even current) staff. These views can often be characteristic of the fact that some ‘manager – employee’ relationships simply don’t work. Recently I’ve started to wonder why, and perhaps more importantly reflect on the damage that oft results.

I’ve been fortunate to work for some brilliant managers. Over the years, they’ve helped me learn and grow, pushed me when I needed it, and yes also kicked me when I needed it. Fortunately, I’ve had very little direct exposure to ‘bad management’; I doubt this is down just to luck. Several of my former bosses have said I am actually easy to manage, whereas I’ve always had the feeling the opposite is true. So why the discrepancy, and why have I apparently been so lucky in my managers? Initially I thought it was because I’ve often had a relationship with my managers before they were my managers. This is because I’ve worked in my organisation a long time and am fairly well known. Getting to know each other this way I think helps, but I doubt is the reason. More likely, I think, is how I see that relationship. I’ve never seen my boss as ‘the boss stereotype’, someone who must be obeyed and whose word is law. Knowing them before them becoming my boss has helped me early on in my career see that when I work for someone I should see it as a partnership, and I now construct the relationship on those terms.

That relationships are constructed is important; they exist independently (mentally speaking) of the people within them. They have characteristics that are specific to that relationship, that are understood by everyone without explanation and they change based on actions and feedback from both parties. And this is related to bad management how, you ask? Since that type of relationship is also constructed, then it is a result of both participant’s view of the other, of their respective actions, the history, and what they see as the likely future of the relationship. The relationship is defined by both participants, regardless as to whether it is good or bad.

The problem with bad management relationships is that if my success is partly grounded in the success of the partnership I have with my boss, then a poor relationship makes success far more difficult and failure far more likely. This is not good for the people involved, or the business.

A bad relationship is also poorly placed to improve, as it is very much easier to allow it to stagnate or degrade further than to make the effort to correct – especially if the employee isn’t sure how to approach it or the manager doesn’t recognise there’s even a problem. This is where bad management is more than just inconvenient and poor practice: because the nature of relationships is to a large degree based on past interactions between participants (which people often view as a sound predictor of future interactions), it is possible for a bad one to damage the performance of the manager and the relevant member of staff, and for this damage to worsen as the relationship becomes increasingly ineffective.

At its worse, a previously successful manager or high-performing member of staff can suddenly appear very much the opposite as their management relationship deteriorates.

In a good relationship, if an employee (or manager) fails to do something or doesn’t do it in the way required, it is likely that both parties will put it down to an error, to a misunderstanding, to any number of things. In some cases, both parties may go so far as try to take responsibility for the failure from the other, sometimes attempting to ‘win’ responsibility so the other person doesn’t feel bad! In damaged relationships what happens is different. The reason attributed to the failure often takes on rather more sinister overtones: “nothing would have been right for my boss” or “I told him what to do, but he deliberately did it wrong”, or many other variations.

The important detail is that in good relationships, former experiences lead people to make positive judgements and attributions when possible sources of conflict arise, which tends to ‘damp down issues’; in deteriorating relationships, people make negative judgements, which tend only to reinforce underlying problems. Both of these carry forward to the next interaction, often further reinforcing belief in a virtuous or vicious circle that can be difficult to break.

Although I’ve written about good and bad relationships, I think, that there are three types of management relationship: the good, the bad, and the neutral. There may be little excuse for a bad management relationship, but it doesn’t mean the opposite is true and that all relationships should be good: some people simply aren’t going to ‘get on’ enough to form this, and this is where I believe ‘neutral’ relationships come in.

With two willing participants, two people who don’t get on can have a successful – and stress-free – management relationship. These relationships are based on shared professional respect for one another, and first and foremost to these is the need for clarity around expectations. It must be clear what a manager expects and what a subordinate will deliver, or vice versa. Ambiguity around this will be fatal to the relationship, but if there is task-based clarity that allows the basis of a relationship to form around “we agreed I would do this and here it is”, then respect should follow. They might still want to shove each other under the nearest bus, but the relationship will still be productive and less likely to damage everyone’s credibility, team morale, and – most importantly – the business. Both manager and employee are equally well placed to get this process starting, and Blanchard’s book “The One Minute Manager” remains an excellent reference for setting and agreeing tasks that would support this form of relationship.

And what if clarity about goals and expectations can’t be agreed between them? Then one – and potentially both – people in the relationship need to examine whether they are being honest about their approach and motivations and make a renewed effort, and if that proves impossible, well, in the words on Sir Alan Sugar, at the end of the exercise, one of you will be fired...

The only thing certain about a bad management relationship is it won’t be productive, and no business should allow that.

The tipping points of change

Over the last couple of years much of my work has been about change in one form or another. There are endless tomes dedicated to the subject: helping making it happen, helping people cope with it, change in a business context, change in a personal context; the list goes on and on. What has come to fascinate me about change is not anything in the list above but simply the ‘tipping points’ of change, of which I think there are two critical ones.

There needs to be recognition or acceptance that change is necessary. This is the first tipping point, and the easier one as ‘facts and figures’ can often show something isn’t working or can work better. This is often the impetus for some form of project to begin. These projects – long and short – are solution-finders, intended to understand the problem (or opportunity) and find a way of overcoming (or exploiting) it. The second tipping point is at the culmination of such projects; actually taking the results and doing something with them. In my experience, this is often the one people find hard, and especially where the change needed is not evolutionary in nature, but revolutionary.

Evolutionary solutions build on what is in place already; they improve current processes and approaches, make them more streamlined etc. Think of the changes to engine efficiency in cars. The need to reduce fuel consumption and emissions has led to significant improvements, but the fundamentals of the engine have remained broadly the same. These improvements have been evolutionary in nature. Sometimes, though, it isn’t possible (or is sub-optimal) to address an issue with such an evolutionary approach; there is a need for something more radical, more revolutionary in nature. This type of change can start from a blank page and go back to basics: the electric car is a revolutionary change to address fuel efficiency.

Here’s the kicker, though: as the electric car example highlights, revolutionary change is significantly more complex and inherently more risky than evolutionary. It is far less ‘familiar’ to people, and I think it is this lack of familiarity that causes many of the difficulties in getting such radical change successfully implemented, let alone embedded.

A number of the projects I’ve been involved in have been tackling ‘endemic’ issues; by this, I mean issues or problems that have been around for so long in one form or another that they are no longer the exception to the rule, but rather have become embedded in how people work. In some strange way people often become comfortable with these problems, because working with or indeed around them has become a matter of routine and people find comfort in the routine. When a new approach changes that routine it often makes people uncomfortable, even when the change might remove a problem or improve their working or personal lives. In these cases, a ‘coping mechanism’ seems to come into play – compromise. Faced with significant change, there is often a desire to maintain an element of the status quo so that the familiar still exists, so that it doesn’t feel quite such a risk and departure from normal business as usual. In the case of evolutionary change, this is not so much a problem; the change is after all based on building upon what is there currently.

In the case of revolutionary change, however, such compromise can be potentially crippling: it’s like trying to swim whilst keeping one hand on the side of the pool.

The basis of much revolutionary change is in establishing a new way of working that removes old issues or creates significant improvement capacity. Its strength is often in taking that blank sheet of paper view and starting more closely from scratch. (This is not to suggest totally from scratch; that is rarely a realistic option.) Compromise – reducing the extent of impact, preserving some old processes etc – is often seen as a risk-reduction approach or a way of winning people over and creating buy-in: the ‘watered down’ version is accepted as having potentially less benefit, but it is easier and still delivers good value. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case.

The irony is that compromise can create a self-fulfilling prophecy for failure: we need to preserve some of the past because this new approach is risky and might go wrong; compromise protects us from risk. In fact, such compromise can expose companies to risk: it makes revolutionary solutions more likely to fail. Naturally, if they do fail everyone is relieved they kept a fallback position, whereas the question that should be being asked is “did it fail because we kept that fallback?”

Such compromise is difficult to avoid without consistent senior management support and buy-in. That sounds like a mantra for all change, but the reality is that most evolutionary change can be justified on the basis of numbers alone: the figures generally add up so managers can be very confident that the change is the right thing to do. Revolutionary change is greater risk / reward, and is harder for managers because it often requires a leap of faith. Rarely is it certain that a solution is the best solution, that all avenues have been explored, that all risks have been minimised, that something horrible hasn’t been overlooked; these all create doubt, doubt creates desire for the reassuringly familiar, this desire leads to compromise, and compromise can lead to failure.

This may seem like I’m unsympathetic towards senior managers; this couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst all this change is going on, the business still has to be run, budgets need to be managed, targets met; adding the risk of significant change to this is a tough choice (and anyone that tells you change isn’t risky is fibbing – it can be managed, but it inevitably adds risk). What I’ve learnt is that compromise is often seen as getting the best of both worlds, whereas the reality is that it often gets the worst of them.

Not compromising can look inflexible, but it doesn’t need to be. Simply establish core design principles (CDPs) and ensure these are carved in rock: these are the untouchables that the change must deliver. There can be discussion about other aspects – within reason – but the CDPs are not up for grabs. If there isn’t enough confidence in a solution or the impetus for change to establish such design principles and stick by them, it’s probably better not to undertake the change at all.