We live in and work in a nest of complex adaptive systems and one of the characteristic of this kind of system is that with time and experience, things tend to become more complex and interdependent.
As a leader, it is our responsibility to understand this increasing complexity and make sense of it. Then break it down to its simplest form and share this with our teams, so that they don’t have to struggle with this complexity in their work.
The question then is how can we do this for our teams. There are three skills that come to the fore in this case.
Seeking
The first step in this process is knowing what information to seek, so that we can see the change in the system dynamics and also find out where is complexity growing.
We can do this by taking a step back and continue to monitor the complexity in the system.
One way to see this is through the amount of specialisation that someone requires in order to understand a system. The higher the specialisation needed, the higher the complexity in the system.
Sensing
Once we have identified the system that is getting more complex with time, we need to then understand what is the complexity about.
This is about understanding how this system works, as a self-contained unit and as a part of the larger system.
This is about understanding the inter-relatedness of this complex adaptive system and how the relationships within the components work.
Sharing
Once we have learnt about the increasing complexity of the systems, understood how it manifests, we need to be able to share this to our teams in a way that is simple.
This requires us to be able to cut to the crux of our understanding of the system and be able to share it in simple language to our teams who are affected by this increasing complexity.
We need to individualise the impact of the increasing complexity for our teams, so that they can focus on how to deal with their part of the complexity and not burden them about the whole, unless their work requires them to understand the entirety of the system.
Conclusion
In conclusion, with time, all systems tend to become more complex. With time, our understanding of how systems function needs to evolve in a way so that we can keep pace with this dynamically changing complexity of systems.
And it is not enough to understand this but to be able to communicate this understanding to our teams in simple language is key to being a good leader, in a complex adaptive systemic world.
