Sherpa Alliance

Conventional management theory focuses on helping you manage two dimensions: strategic-planning and implementation.  Strategic planning is about the latitude of things at a high level, thinking broadly about your business.  Implementation is about the altitude of things and bringing them down to ground level where they can make a practical difference.  Both of these 2 dimensions are critical — but not enough — because the real world is three dimensional, not just two.

The all-important third and longitudinal dimension is that of the journey itself, from which the intersection of strategic-planning and implementation is merely the starting point. The journey is your ongoing path and trajectory toward your goals, planning and implementing strategy, executing a myriad of changes and overseeing numerous operations.  The complexity of operating in this three-dimensional world is just like for a jet fighter pilot (The Fighter Pilot's OODA Loop).  This is where your overwhelm is coming from and is what traditional management consulting, coaching and training typically fails to address.

Never mind simply the detail complexity of each individual task or operation, such as managing the design and marketing of a single new product. You must also contend with the dynamic complexity of overseeing multiple product lines, in various stages of their life cycle, plus overall cash flow, human resource management, competition and environmental factors, to name just some of the variables you have to deal with (The Traffic of Dynamic Complexity).  Even more challenging, all of these variables are consistently in a state of change. It’s analogous to playing several games of chess against world chess masters, simultaneously.  Mastering dynamic complexity has become so much more important as change has changed.  It is central to translating strategy and execution into traction, as a dynamic journey on a shifting landscape.

Believe it or not, you have the innate ability to manage this amount of change and the associated detail complexity and dynamic complexity already. In fact, you do it every day, in your car, on your way to work.

Think about it. When you’re in the driving seat of your car, you’re managing the dynamic complexity of ever-changing variables all around you. How is it that you are able to navigate the freeway, steer clear of obstacles and cars cutting you off, talk on your cell phone (hands free of course), adjust the radio and consult your GPS or printed map, all at the same time, and arrive at your office safely, on time, each and every day?  Since you started driving you have been travelling the learning curve to the winning side of dynamic complexity.