Articles related to the challenge of understanding and managing complexity.
Now that we have excessively moaned about the challenges the rise of complexity in our organizational life is creating for hard-working executives, let’s talk about how to deal with it! The bad news is you will rarely find straight forward solutions to complex problems. As soon as an issue is messy, trying to solve it…Continue Reading “‘Complexity Cheats’ – A Hot-wire Toolkit for Cracking Complex Challenges”
In the first three parts of our series on complexity we have focused primarily on framing what we mean when we talk about complexity and we have begun exploring the demands increasing complexity poses on leaders and senior executives. In this fourth part of the series we will start to look into the particular capabilities…Continue Reading “Stretching Your Thinking to Manage Greater Complexity”
Just recently a friend who is familiar with our work on helping companies to better cope with complex challenges remarked jokingly: ‘Lucky you, being a complexity specialist allows you to get all your kids to all the right places roughly at the right time!’ ‘Well’, I equally jokingly replied,’ that’s just operational complexity. You should…Continue Reading “Stepping Up: How Work Complexity Expands By Organizational Level”
For years the dominant view of organizations has been mechanistic; a company should run like a clockwork, the cogs just needed to be aligned to fit, run smoothly and with least possible friction. Anyone who has dared enter the murky waters of organizational behaviour will agree though that this is a gross over-simplification of a…Continue Reading “Systemic Complexity in Business: More Than the Sum of the Parts”