Following the presentation of The Dao of Complexity at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam in March, a few questions remained unexplored. These boil down to:

Why, if the ancients thought in ways similar to the insights from the science of complexity, does it never seem to ‘catch on’?
How do you ‘get’ people to ‘get complexity’?

It struck me that these two questions are related and I’m going to address them via three key aspects:

Our cognitive preferences: Focus on detail or big picture? Local or wider-ranging? Logic or gut feel? Easy with ambiguity and paradox?
Helping people to get complexity: through stories, challenges and questions; and through setting the conditions for people to handle complexity
Power: Do we tend to conform to cultural or organisational expectations or are we more likely to adopt a critical or independent or out-of-the-box stance? What is our relationship with power? And what is our understanding of how power constellates?

Read in this blogpost:

But first, to set the scene, what is complexity?

In a nutshell, the complexity worldview — the perspective on the ‘nature of things’ surfaced through the science of complexity — sees the world as patterned, shaped by history and context. It shows that, paradoxically, constant adjustment and constant change create stability and equally can lead to emergent transformation.

I am following in the tradition of Prigogine and others working with what Morin called the ‘general complexity’ of ‘open systems’; this goes beyond what can be captured by mathematics or models. The core message is that if we embrace this view of how the world works, then it reframes what we regard as professional practice, how we manage and structure organisations, how we make sense of the global world and how we live our lives.

To return to the question I am addressing here: how can we invite and cajole people into ‘getting complexity’, and indeed into seeing complexity as generative rather than something to master?

I’ll consider the three topics listed above:

Cognitive preferences

We don’t all think alike. There are many heuristics and models that look at difference in personality or learning styles:

There is Jung’s typology — suggesting that some people tend to notice detail and others notice patterns and connections; and that some preference logic in decision making and others call on ‘gut feel’.

Then there is McGilchrist’s view that we have access to two distinct cognitive ‘signatures’ — the left brain and the right brain. Left brain thinking values causal linear logic operating on objective data; the right brain is more inclined to see patterns, handle paradox — and make judgements in the face of competing values and purposes and incomplete or ambiguous information.

Thus, in Jung’s terms, those who are intuitive patterns spotters and also can extend from hard-edged analytical thinking into valuing ‘the gut’ may find the complexity worldview both more natural and more palatable. Equally, building on McGilchrist, those with a tendency to lead with the ‘right brain’ are more likely to embrace the world as complex than those who preference the ‘left brain’.

The left brain, according to McGilchrist, focuses on analysing ‘the now’ and seeks certainty and analytical rigour. Engaging the left brain is essential when we need to cut through detail and take action. But, he explains, it is dangerous when we start to believe that the world really is certain, predictable and controllable.

In addition to Jung and McGilchrist, there are developmental models of cognition: Gillian Stamp’s growth curves (building on Elliot Jaques), Bill Torbert’s action logic and Ken Wilbur’s spiral dynamics. These models suggest that, as people mature through their lived experience, they tend to transition from the concreteness and immediacy common in young children — through to widening horizons, seeing connections across different modalities, recognising integrative patterns, handling ambiguity. Wilbur’s approach in particular suggests that this progression happens not just cognitively , but with the ‘heart-mind’ or Xin. Embracing complexity requires more than ‘just thinking’.

Torbert introduces the idea of post-conventional approaches. Those adopting post conventional logics are more likely to question the norms of the status quo, ask why as much as how. They may more easily handle paradox, seek unobvious connections, juggle incommensurate values and purposes and take a critical stance.

Not everyone is convinced by McGilchrist’s understanding of the brain, nor indeed by Jung’s typology, and the development models are largely heuristics. But what I find compelling is that these differing models and approaches converge, resonate. I think they illuminate why some people are very comfortable with a complexity worldview whilst others push against it; and why some seek for tools to manage or navigate or minimise complexity, whereas others are excited to embrace the idea, to quote William James, that “possibilities may be in excess of actualities” and are motivated to see where these possibilities might lead.

So, understanding where people are at in respect of cognitive preferences and styles is an important starting point when considering ways to introduce the complexity worldview.

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

So, what does this all mean for helping people to ‘get’ complexity?

(a) Working with groups: stories, challenges, comparisons.

So, with this variation in cognitive preferences described above, what practical things do I do when working with groups?

Exploring ‘reality’

I ask people questions such as: ‘has your life gone to plan, has the strategy you’ve helped develop gone to plan and if not, why not?’ The answers — the world changed, unintended consequences, other people’s or other organisations’ behaviours, things we had deemed unimportant or had not noticed raising their head — tend to contain the bones of the complexity worldview, which I then ‘reveal’.

I often follow this, in organisational contexts, with this exercise: ‘you can’t change the method of strategy development set down by your organisation, but how can you tweak how you use it with complexity in mind?’ People respond with: ‘review more often; design a portfolio approach; expect things not to go to plan — have contingency, be prepared to learn and adjust as you go; bring multiple stakeholders into strategy and review meeting to gain a wider perspective; pay more attention to building networks/following changes in the market/wider environment. The exercise tends to reassure people that they don’t have to throw away everything to start paying more attention to the implications of working in a systemic, changing, emerging world.

Stories

I collect stories and examples of practices that take account of the complexity of the world. For example: how adjusting budgets to work across silos encourages more collaboration and innovative solutions and tends to save money compared with focusing on shaving budgets within silos; how education that is more holistic tends to create better outcomes for measures of numeracy and literacy compared with cutting out ‘extraneous subjects’ like art and music and focusing on the basics ‘3Rs’. I look for stories from other countries (combining nurseries with care homes), stories from the past, stories of good practice and of ‘bad’. I aim to evidence that systemic, adaptive approaches can be both effective and efficient. Wherever I can, I include tangible measures and data in support.

Comparing organisations or communities to families

Another conversation that tends to land the ‘aha’ response is to explore how people think about their families. I say, “Imagine if I were a social worker about to engage with your family. I do an analysis and categorise your family as fitting into a particular category. This will determine how I will intervene and what you need to do to improve.” How do you react? Yet isn’t this what we do in organisations, which are only larger versions of a family — individuals relating, open to wider influences, shaped by history?

So, these are some of the approaches I take to try and loosen the grip of the machine metaphor.

There is also much that leaders and facilitators can do to help people develop into their confidence to handle the complex world, to ‘peer over the parapet into the post conventional world’, to quote one colleague.

(b) What can leaders do: creating the conditions where people can develop

Organisations increasingly have become places which equate effectiveness with standardisation and manage through procedures and rules. There seems to be an increasing rather than decreasing desire to turn organisations into machines and to treat people within them like cogs in those machines. In effect, we are asked to leave our creativity and even our caring at the door and turn up, follow the rules, fill in the forms and go home. If it doesn’t work, it is not our problem.

If we manage people in this way, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to gain enough confidence to stretch themselves into embracing complexity: trusting their judgement even when the picture is unclear, engaging with the bigger picture, experimenting and being willing to fail, taking responsibility, aiming to ‘do the right thing’ as opposed to ‘do things right’.

So, even in organisations that expect and reward compliance, how can you, with your team, with the agency you have (however limited that feels), create the conditions for those around you to get more used to facing the complexity of the world. As David Eagleman emphasises, the brain is plastic and has the capacity of re-orienting us in response to new experiences, rewards and environmental cues. We all have the capacity to change.

What kind of things can we do? It may be as simple as:

Asking at the end of every meeting, whether people have noticed anything, in the course of their work, that is new, interesting or surprising. It’s a great way to surface ‘new shoots of change’, to uncover islands of good practice or identify worrying signs of decay or instability.
Building enough trust that people can share concerns and discuss what hasn’t gone well or hasn’t gone to plan. Unpicking those stories so there is shared learning.
Discussing the big picture/wider context with the team; gaining their perspective on this wider context and discussing its impact on today’s work and tomorrow’s direction.
Giving people opportunities to experiment, test their judgement, challenge, think outside the box, take a critical stance.
Allowing people to express gut feels and instincts and flex their imagination as well as their concrete analytical skills.
Creating an environment in which people can learn, experiment, challenge, contribute their intelligence, use their initiative.
Recognising people are of different types — some people get this more than others, some people need more certainty, others crave greater freedom.

It strikes me that this is very similar to designing ways for family members to mature, experiment and learn.

One additional thought: it is also salutary to remember that not everyone has been trained and educated to see reason, structure, objectivity as the gold standard of how to be professional, how to succeed.

One particular story comes to mind that caused me to reflect on the entrancement of the West with the machine view:

I was giving a talk for an organisation called Social Action for Health, based in East London, an organisation for which I was Chair for some years. There were maybe 200 people at the conference, drawn from academia, from local primary and public health organisations, and from not-for-profits engaged around health inequalities. There were also many sessional workers from the communities the charity was trying to help, including recent migrants from Somalia and Bengal. In the lunch queue, I overheard a Somali woman explaining the intricacies of complexity thinking to a Bengali woman. They both got it immediately, I imagine because what I was describing accorded with their personal life experience. Furthermore, they hadn’t been tutored in the mechanistic approaches to management, education and evaluation increasingly dominant in the west. They didn’t have to unlearn something.

I had a similar experience when my Mother first watched a video of me talking about complexity. She was mesmerised. Her reaction was both awe and confusion: how do you know all this … but isn’t complexity obvious?

The point is that if our societies and organisations expect and reward a mechanistic approach, then we run the risk of creating an environment where people are not encouraged towards criticality, novelty, experiment and engagement with the complex. We limit learning. It can sometimes feel to people it is better to do what you have been asked to do rather than risk doing what you know will be more effective. We are encouraged to leave our brains in the entrance hall and turn ourselves into unthinking cogs in a machine, responsible only for doing what we are asked, unattached to the consequences.

What makes this shift problematic? The issue that people sometimes raise is one of job security. They feel they have to play the game and satisfy the methods and measures imposed on them; they don’t want to rock the boat. Discussing how to bend the rules a bit, how to ask more questions, how to find small ways to experiment or modify their ways of working with their immediate team can ease people into being willing to look over the parapet into the complex world.

I was delighted when, having talked about these ideas in a workshop, one senior manager in the health sector came up to me and said: ‘Right, that is it! I am no longer willing just to go along with things if they make no sense or indeed make things worse. I wouldn’t hesitate to challenge nonsense outside my work life, and I am not going to do it any longer at work.’

Power

One question that seems confounding is why, despite everything, we continue to act as if the world is more certain and controllable than it is. For some this is because the alternative fear-inducing image is of total chaos. It is important to explore that complexity thinking suggests a middle ground — the world in general is neither chaotic nor well-ordered, it is somewhere in between. We can’t know everything but that’s not to say we know nothing.

Managing through plans, hierarchies, measures and controls is what we deem professional, what is expected. It is orthodoxy. It makes us feel that reason will get us to the right answer, that our human world can be understood through rational means.

But this view is more than orthodox, it is hegemonic. It offers dominance and power to those who are in control of the hierarchy. And those who benefit have a vested interest in leaving things be.

This hanging onto power is something really to take into account when trying to change organisations and styles. It explains why senior managers sometimes close down change initiatives when they are really getting somewhere, why both evidence of failure and well-researched alternatives often fall on deaf ears. This is something to be cognizant of early on in trying to explore and create change; otherwise the heavy foot of power may trample on the best of endeavours. Sadly, those nurtured just-growing shoots are easy to stamp out.