Thriving in the Age of Complexity - With no answers, only choices

You are hearing more and more that the current recession has bottomed out, that the economic crisis is easing as job losses slow and we are beginning to see confidence return to the marketplace.  This is good news indeed as we turn from survival and begin to look forward.

 Nevertheless, the global business environment is becoming more and more interconnected and complex.

The future will see new uncertainties, ambiguities and even more surprises.  Our world is acting as a complex system, and what we are now experiencing is just a taste of what will undoubtedly come.

The immediate issue for all of us is that our old ways of looking at and seeing the world do not work anymore, blinding us to today’s world as it really is.  And when we can’t see the world as it really is, we miss new opportunities, and we are blindsided by unforeseen threats while uncertainty and continual surprise paralyze us into inaction.

Right now, as most of you start your 2010 planning and budgeting cycle (which may be harder than ever) you have to ask yourselves two questions:

1.    “In this complex world, how can an organization think about such variability and uncertainty, and set a course forward?”

 And once we are able to do this,

2.    “How do we transform our organization to be able to act with intention, taking advantages of new opportunities as they emerge and create a lasting competitive advantage?”

We have been thinking long and hard about these critical questions. In our September newsletter we present some of the concepts we have explored, what we have learned, and how we are working with our clients on this new challenge.  Go here to download and read the complete newsletter.

Comments

[Steve Barth]

Great thoughts, Richard. Of course, the world we live in has long been a complex adaptive system. For humans, though, we tend to get to a point where it's no longer useful to pretend otherwise, neh? That is, it's always easier to simplify as long as we can get away with it--then folly to keep simplifying after that.

[twitter.com/nadinemt]

Just finished reading your newsletter. I couldn’t help but thinking about complex systems in the natural world throughout my reading (must me my biology background creeping out). Adaptation of living organisms behave in much the same manner as you describe. Mass extinctions, long explained by single catastrophic events, are now being examined through the lens of complex and interconnected systems which, as you say, become weaker as the interconnectedness and dependencies deepen within them. A small shift within the web of life can cause huge changes to the entire environment and living systems resulting in extinctions and the need for organisms to adapt or die. We are already living in tomorrow’s world in so many ways, we just haven’t taken our knowledge of the natural world and transferred it to the business world where we now all hunt, eat and try o survive.