Sherpa Alliance

So what do we mean by “dynamic complexity”?

In his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge said:

"There are two types of complexity – detail complexity and dynamic complexity. The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity not detail complexity”

He goes on to say:

“The reason that sophisticated tools of forecasting and business analysis, as well as elegant strategic plans, usually fail to produce dramatic breakthroughs in managing a business - they are all designed to handle the sort of complexity in which there are many variables: detail complexity. But there are two types of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where cause and effect are subtle and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity. Unfortunately, most “systems analyses” focus on detail complexity not dynamic complexity. For most people “systems thinking” means “fighting complexity with complexity”, devising increasingly complex (we should really say “detailed”) solutions to increasingly “complex” problems. In fact, this is the antithesis of real systems thinking”.

So Peter Senge defines dynamic complexity as, “situations where cause and effect are subtle and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious”, going on to say, “when the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in another part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity”. Still somewhat abstract, but he brings it home with an example which he relates to business:

"A gyroscope is a dynamically complex machine; if you push downward on one edge, it moves to the left; if you push another edge to the left, it moves upward. Yet, how trivially simple is a gyroscope when compared with the complex dynamics of an enterprise, where it takes days to produce something, weeks to develop a new marketing promotion, months to hire and train new people, and years to develop new products, nurture management talent, and build a reputation for quality - and all of these process interact continually”.

Translating this into more day-to-day practical terms for you, think about some of the ways in which things are more dynamically complex than they used to be:

· We live in a 24/7, online-all-the-time, revved up world, with increasing expectations of near-real-time responsiveness.  Not so long ago, if we sent a fax one day we might expect a return fax a few days later.  Not so with e-mail, it’s a few hours later and you get tens if not hundreds per day.

· We are experiencing a blur of change, innovation and technology adoption. Our mental agility is being tested more and more as we try to keep up, getting our heads around morphing business models, technologies and change programs.

· Our world is flatter, internally and externally, with an array of out-sourcing, in-sourcing, free-agent, channel-partnership and alliance relationships, and a constantly changing landscape of mergers & acquisitions, start-ups and spin-offs.  All of these require a new level of collaboration, communication and coordination.

· Our need to learn, apply and achieve with new knowledge, skills and talents is accelerating all the time.

In other words, the “traffic” of our lives has increased dramatically and, like many of our cities at rush-hour, our freeways get clogged because our infrastructure to process the traffic pattern is insufficient.  We haven’t kept up with the increasing levels of traffic.

It is also that we are increasingly experiencing a different kind of traffic. In his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen puts it this way:

“A major factor in the mounting stress level is that the actual nature of our jobs [work] has changed much more dramatically and rapidly than have our training for and our ability to deal with work.  In the old days, work was self evident.  Now, for many of us, there are no edges to [our work and] most of our projects.  The organizations we are involved with seem to be in constant morph mode, with ever changing goals, products, partners, customers, markets, technologies and owners.  These all, by necessity, shake up structures, forms, roles and responsibilities”.

The nature of work itself has changed and things are in a constant morph mode.   In the face of increasing ambiguity, diversity and uncertainty, we have to evolve a new chassis of business acumen, built around the higher order strengths executives need to be prone to success not failure.

In these increasingly dynamic conditions, our need to learn, apply and achieve with new knowledge, skills and telents is accelerating all the time. In their 2002 book, the Communication Catalyst, Connolly & Rianoshek put it this way:

“The interactions in static business conditions are different from the interactions in dynamic conditions. It is very possible that you already possess the leadership and communication skills that meet the challenge of static conditions. They have been honed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Someone adept at the dynamic imperatives has the skills necessary to identify static opportunities; in our experience the reverse is not true. The dynamic skills are unusual, and developing them fully requires considerable personal interest.”

This is our challenge – to be keeping up with the traffic of dynamic complexity in our lives – the increasing volume of traffic; the changing nature of the traffic; the increasing revs and speed of that traffic. To prevent traffic-jams, we need to be keeping up in evolving our traffic infrastructure, bringing our mastery of dynamic conditions and dynamic complexity to the same level as our mastery of static conditions and detail complexity. Our organizational agility depends upon it:  In the Driving Seat of Organizational Agility.