Embrace Complexity- Don’t Suppress it


When we talk about the complexity of modern life we often use the term quite loosely. We probably mean there is a lot more going on than there ever used to be. As customers we get more choice than ever before, we can buy from a wholly new range of retailers and pay in all sort of convoluted ways. The things we buy aren’t made by a single individual, a craftsman working in a machine shop, above or behind the retail outlet we are visiting. A single item that we purchase might be made in multiple countries by multiple companies and also be sold in multiple continents. Undoubtedly this appears more complex than subsistence farming, or even industrial revolution scale manufacturing. But what does this complexity mean? What are its implications?

Complexity in the scientific sense means that there are characteristics in a larger system that are emergent from the characteristics of the individual parts, yet which are not present in those parts. In other words, once you connect the whole system together, new properties emerge. Things start to happen that are more than simply replicating what happens in each element of the network. This is a fundamental biological and physical principle. New patterns emerge as a result, the ripples made by wind on the beach, the movement of a shoal of fish, even the stripes on a zebra.

Each time something is added or removed from this complex web, the emergent property changes. Imagine a successful global supply chain for a household product. It runs successfully through Latin America, North America and Europe. Now the business wishes to expand into South East Asia. In doing so it takes its successful infrastructure, processes and culture to the new region, makes them explicit to the new partners and employees (through training programmes, manuals and workshops).

Yet something else is at play. The cultural traditions of society and business in SE Asia, the differing geography and retail outlets all start to bump into this existing orthodoxy and interact with it. Finance maybe works in different ways. So there is a competition between these cultures that gives rise to new forms of interaction that weren’t prevalent in either system before they bumped into each other. The result is that the new and expanded global supply chain is different everywhere as a result.

This is a somewhat stylised version to make the point more clearly. The important point is that ways of working that may be stable and successful at one level of organisation won’t necessarily deliver the same results as the situation becomes more complex. If we are to operate in a complex environment we need a way of interacting with our environment that recognises this generative capacity. Too often we try to impose on it a simplified way of working that has been successful in other settings.

If we genuinely believe the world to be a complex place, we need to consciously embrace that complexity, not suppress it. Once we do this, we realise we cannot resolve our activity into standardised processes without forever generating unintended consequences to our actions. Recognising the world we live in as a complex environment doesn’t allow us to control it. Instead it makes clear what Donella Meadows called the irreducible uncertainty that is a characteristic of such environments.

We know the wind will make ripples in the sand on the beach, but we cannot manage or predict when those ripples will be where. So we need to embrace the unintended consequences of our actions as pointers that guide us more closely towards what is the real nature of the system in which we live. What are they telling us? What benefit might they bring?