Worklife is complex. Whether we are making sense of hybrid work and its impact on the employee experience, raising a family, or changing career paths, every day we make decisions amidst complexity. Recognizing this reality and the impact that it is having on leaders, our organization’s senior leadership team co-created (foreshadowing!) a workshop on managing complexity (with an emphasis on the work part of worklife). From creating the conditions for collaboration across teams to applying cool tools like Waysfinder, here are five tips for navigating worklife complexity.
Complexify your mindset
Complex systems typically involve many interacting elements that are not always connected in a linear manner. Because the system is ever-changing, solutions emerge from the system, as opposed to being imposed on it. Complex systems are like the Amazon rainforest as opposed to a Tesla assembly line. In 2007, David Snowden and Mary Boone’s HBR article highlighted how leaders can make better decisions by understanding and embracing complexity:
Most situations and decisions in organizations are complex because some major change—a bad quarter, a shift in management, a merger or acquisition—introduces unpredictability and flux. In this domain, we can understand why things happen only in retrospect. Instructive patterns, however, can emerge if the leader conducts experiments that are safe to fail. That is why, instead of attempting to impose a course of action, leaders must patiently allow the path forward to reveal itself. They need to probe first, then sense, and then respond.
During our workshop, our team explored the Cynefin Framework (below), which Snowden and Boone believe “helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so that they can make appropriate choices” by understanding how different domains require difference actions.
For example, clear or simple solutions should be automated. Either a robot can complete the task or a human knows what to do because that path has probably been walked before. Complicated solutions require a project plan and good tactics to achieve the desired outcomes. Complex solutions are enabled by learning and sense making – teams co-create emergent practices based on the results of experimentation. When we are searching for solutions amidst chaos all that we can do is act and reflect on what happened.
Embrace the office
Co-creating in-person drives creativity and enhances clarity. What I am noticing from several case studies and good practices for navigating complexity is that folks are doing so together in-person. Not all the time, but certainly for key moments. When people from different cultural, academic, socio-economic, and/or professional backgrounds are brought together to tackle a project, there is potential to achieve richer outcomes. With Sharpies in our hands, our workshop team scribbled people, supplies, and abstract concepts like ‘reskilling’ on flipcharts, proving that greatness comes from the sum of a team’s parts, not just the individual contributor’s ideas (or their ability to draw well).
Everything from reading body-language to amplifying quieter voices in the room is enabled by bringing folks together in person with intention. Recently, two team members who are in Toronto traveled to our offices to kick off a project. Big problems were solved, difficult conversations were had, and healthy relationships were built because, for this intentional period of time, we were co-creating solutions to complicated problems together.
Plan to adapt
Sonja Blignaut’s Waysfinder framework for making decisions amidst complexity suggests that leaders need to shift from seeking tidy, linear solutions to striving for “messy coherence” – she expands on the idea:
Embracing messy coherence requires us to let go of long-held assumptions of a world where stability, certainty and predictability are the norm. In this world, we were taught to use linear, deterministic management methods and tools and also that alignment to shared goals and values is key to success. The COVID19 pandemic and climate change, among others, have made us realize that we do indeed inhabit a complex and entangled world, one that is unpredictable.
It is hard for people to let go or unlearn the winning behaviours that got us to where we are today. Many leaders have ascended and advanced by ‘knowing it all’ or by being excellent at organizing teams, information, and products into tidy categories that serve an industrial process for getting work done.
Rather than setting specific goals or developing a fully baked three year strategic plan, planning to adapt means setting a direction or intention and then adjust course along the way (more on this later). From my perspective, the greatest way that leaders can plan to adapt is by enabling and empowering others to solve problems.
Co-creation >>> collaboration >>> cooperation
Complexity is best navigated with collaboration and, ideally, co-creation. People working together to solve problems and build novel things responds to systemic challenges better than the giving-and-taking of cooperation or the, um, sitting together and showing others your ideas of coordination.
Michael Göthe, Agile Organizational Coach and the facilitator of the workshop for my organization’s senior leadership team, drew the model below to emphasize how sharing power drives performance and creates more value for stakeholders.
According to Michael Davey, Fast Company contributor and CEO of Wheel, co-creation and collaboration coupled with transparency enable better decision making during uncertain time: “The truth is, we don’t know what’s around the corner. But I’d rather explain to employees how we’re thinking about an uncertain future rather than avoid the topic altogether. And setting that example creates a halo effect around the company, encouraging employees at all levels to prioritize honesty over hype.”
Creating ideas, products, services, and experiences together gives teams and organizations a better shot at being inoculated against disruption.
Tinker, play, quit, learn, repeat
My favourite thing about Blignaut’s Waysfinder model is that tinkering and adaptability are built into the process. Striving towards a clear direction or intention is focused by understanding the boundaries in which a plan is unfolding. Boundaries could be fixed, like adhering to regulatory requirements, or they could be self-imposed and somewhat changeable, like budgets or timelines.
The Waysfinder approach expects multiple ideas or products to be simultaneously and collaboratively attempted based on the potentialities from each starting point. Blignaut highlights that “at its heart, it enables a process of continuous orientation or ongoing situational assessment and sense-making of where we are, who we are, and where we fit in the current environment.” Complexity makes our position ever-changing so we need to continuously evaluate and orient ourselves to determine the next right thing that we can do en route to our direction and intention.
Whether individuals or teams use Waysfinder for career development or strategic planning, we can often make sense of where we are amidst complexity by asking what is possible from here?