Q&A: Complexity Competent Leadership
Earlier this year, Amanda delivered a version of the Complexity Competent Leadership course to a group of MBA students as part of their studies into systems thinking and complexity. Before the seminar, students had been given some pre-reading requirements and suggestions, with the opportunity to ask questions ahead of time. There wasn’t time to go through each of the individual questions in the session but they are so thoughtful and provoking that we thought it would be valuable to share both the questions and Amanda’s short responses back to the class and with our community here.
We love to discuss ways of improving organisational working and the process of change. If you want to carry on the discussion from any of the points shared here we’d be happy to talk.
How do you personally decide when ‘good enough clarity’ is sufficient in complex contexts, rather than waiting for false certainty? How can this be communicated with care and intention across cultural contexts?
There’s a popular acronym ‘GETMO’. It stands for Good Enough To Move On. Good enough clarity will be sufficient knowledge to successfully take just the next step in the right direction (which is only possible to know if you’ve done the work of first clearly contracting a shared objective). Communicating your rationale to maybe a very large group of people will be difficult because we all vary so much in our tolerance of ambiguity and of risk. You’ve focused on ‘with care and intention’ so here are a few ideas for what I think that looks like in practice. What else do you think is important?
- Caring and intentional communication is a conversation, so even if it’s mass communication how can you show others you are listening for and welcoming their responses?
- Caring and intentional communication is also careful and makes an effort – so if you could do a bit more work to get clarity not over just the next step but the one after that… why wouldn’t you?! We’re trying to avoid dithering and ‘toxic whataboutery’, not diligent effort.
- Caring and intentional communication shows humility, so also communicate what sensors you are putting in place to check your reasoning and manage your risk.
The reading resonated with me, and my work. It feels like the biggest constraint to adaptive leadership is time/capacity – time to work with colleagues/stakeholders, for them to invest in developing new skills required, etc. How do you create that space/capacity in a constrained financial environment where you are already being asked to do more with less?
There is a quote I love from Dallas Willard ‘We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality’ that is, we need to build a way of living or working in which it is actually possible to do the right thing. I agree with you that it is difficult, if not impossible, to take the time to collaborate to create with others (rather than dominate them or transact with them) in most current organisational contexts. But if we want collaborative, systemic change we must start in the everyday by making space for those creative collaborative moments to emerge. Not by creating big shiny engagement programmes or commitments to coproduction that cannot be fulfilled.
Don’t lose hope! We can use systems thinking to help us find small actions that might create big opportunities. For example, Donella Meadows describes in her book the power of delays in regulating systems. This worked really well for me when I changed my approach to scheduling meetings from filling my next available slot (like a good, efficient worker, right?) to the longest delay possible without it risking the success of the meeting. Building in the delays flattened out the oscillations in my capacity with the outcome that I was ‘generally free’. A word of caution: you do need to be quite bold with even those small actions. Rejecting busyness is radical!
When I consider my experience, I feel that some firms do better at looking to the future than others. Certainly in the finance/banking sector, I feel Tier-1 institutions struggle to identify complexity within their organisations and then do something about it. I feel this distinction between leadership, authority and power could be addressed but it’s that concern about the “Old Guard” losing some form of power or influence. How do you feel larger institutions can effectively implement adaptive leadership in the next decade when we will see a generational shift of workers? And do you believe there will be more demand for your services as the next round of management & leaders lack this education to take institutions forward?
Firstly, the Adaptive Leadership approach in the book [set as pre-reading] describes to me an individual approach to operating within the constraints of exactly the kind of institutions you highlight. This is my main criticism of AL. AL avoids the greater systemic challenge to organisational economies. It can read a little like ‘How to keep feeling like the good guy in a violent and unsustainable system’. So, I want to make my ethics here explicit: my motivation for organisational wellbeing comes from seeking an equitable society for human flourishing, care and environmental sustainability. That’s quite a different measure of leadership success to purely seeking bottom line growth for one individual business! Given that’s how I judge organisational effectiveness, my answer to your question about how larger institutions can implement more complexity competent leadership is, very high level, to develop leadership as a feature of communities not an individual capability. In any given group be it a team, a board, a partnership, neighbours: how will we set our direction? How will we make wise and equitable decisions? How will we make ourselves accountable?
Given that ‘all models are wrong, and some are useful’, where does adaptive leadership most often fall short in your experience? What other leadership perspectives are helpful to consider to compensate for those limits?
Related to my response above, I have become wary of leadership or management advice that does not make its purposes and ethics clear. What is good leadership? Holding on to power? Getting promoted into authority? Making lots of money? Stewarding common goods? Creating places of safety? Arbitrating within communities? In my opinion, adaptive leadership doesn’t say explicitly what that kind of leadership is for, other than being better.
My approach to systems conscious leadership is to work at both the individual and group level to interrogate explicitly’, fully, and in the everyday, ‘what is our best hope here? Both the outcome we long for and how we want to live together (ethics)’ (Focus) ‘How would we know if we were moving towards it? Who can tell us if we’re getting it right or wrong?’ (Confidence) And ‘What signs can we see that change is already happening? Where is our best hope emerging right now?’ (Adaptive).
Complex issues often need genuine collaboration between organisations, especially in the public sector especially. This often works better in theory than in practise and, indeed experience, often depends on the people involved and the relationships they hold. How do we move from individuals being comfortable with emergent practice to creating a wider culture and, further, how do we maintain that when working with partners across the system?
There are individual differences in tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty and novelty seeking (in psychology we call this trait ‘Openness to Experience’). Some people will always be happier with change than others. There are also individual differences in prosocial behaviour and working with others (‘Agreeableness’). Some people will always be happier collaborating with others. Yet at the same time, creativity and adaptability and socialising and collaboration are fundamental human features. We do all know how to do this.
It is the practice of work and organising that gets in the way, not humans themselves. A big error is to try and use dehumanising systems of industrialisation for human collaboration and then just shoehorn the humanity back in at the end. Standardising the work removes autonomy, asking for a fully worked out plan in advance that quickly fails removes the possibility of mastery, segmenting tasks between people who interact only as inputs and outputs removes the real relationships that form social connection – only superhumans and psychopaths do well in these contexts.
When we use relational working (understanding, compassionate, high trust, high accountability) people are great at collaborating and being creative.
Working in the public sector in an agency that was created as a result of the Covid Pandemic from both historic and new organisations, how can I find the space to work in the PZD when the amount of technical problems can feel all consuming? Having listened to the podcast with Gabriella Kellerman could creative hygiene be part of the solution? ( this is a fascinating concept!). The acknowledgment that change is just going to keep coming and we have to do some acceptance work of this was also powerful.
I think some of my earlier responses have also spoken to this question, so I just want to highlight the importance of getting the focus and confidence right. Working on technical problems is great if they are the right problems within the right parameters. My main anxiety when doing team off sites is that when we have a genuine honest conversation teams become aware that most of their day to day is meaningless. This can have a huge positive impact if you have the power and authority to change your work… but if you don’t it will lead to low motivation at best and burnout at worst. If you do find yourself in a situation like that, then I would agree that a creative hygiene at team level that supports people to safely share concerns and to creatively respond and adapt within their work will likely be protective. But it will be a challenge and lead to that common lament of ‘I love my team but I hate my job’ within large institutions.
How much change is too much change? If one works in institutional structures, they have systems and a culture of doing things. Introducing new ways to work with your team that is out of alignment, could back fire, or gain little traction. How do you bring the system with you, without it taking 10 years for deep change?
This is a GREAT question. How much change is too much change for what? For avoiding unintended consequences? For avoiding system snap back (where the system equilibrium rejects the change, sometimes quite violently)? For adoption and naturalisation to occur? Learning about complex system behaviour suggests to me it would be impossible to forecast enough or too much change. Instead, sustainable peaceful change proceeds gently with slow and small solutions, checking for feedback as we go. It may take 10 years.
As for bringing people with you, the twee sentiment is that if you build change with them then they’re already there. No need to ‘bring’ anyone anywhere. Of course that means you also might end up with different changes to the ones you initially imagined.
Sometimes you might need change faster, so what are you willing to risk to make that speed possible? And whose humanity might you trespass on? And what resource might you exploit unsustainably? How will you make yourself accountable?