Chaos to Complexity Not Everything is an Emergency
Navigating Chaos to Complexity: Everything is Not an Emergency
When everything changes and you have not experienced this change before – how do you lead and plan?
Learning from Chaos to Complexity. When everything changes and you have not experienced this change before – how do you lead and plan? As you gain experience how do you support your teams progress? 2 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
5 Confused – when you are unsure, uncertain, and confused you are in a state of disorder. This is the place you stand by yourself or with your team. This is where you make sense of what is happening, then determine which domain (Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaos) you may be standing. Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
Clear Challenges – there exist current best practices, and your team can find or ask others how to improve. The ambiguity is limited to the process data, and the understanding of the pieces that make the whole – optimize the parts the whole will improve. 6 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
Complicated Challenges – there exist subject-matter- experts who have good practices, in-depth knowledge, and expertise in the control and how to affect these processes. Your team can meet with these experts, and the experts can provide some methods to improve, i.e., most IT implementations, SixSigma, Lean, or quality management. The current staff does not currently understand the ambiguity, and an outside expert helps share their steps and processes. 7 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
Complex Challenges – cause and effect are not obvious, and changes to one area will affect many other areas in unknown or unknowable ways. To make sense of progress, your team and organization have to look for patterns and attempt multiple safe-to-fail experiments. The safe-to-fail experiments happen while seeking what is working to increase and not working to decrease. 8 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
Chaos Challenges – sudden, unexpected, unplanned shift happens internally or externally. No one expected or was prepared. The potential damage to the organization, you, your team is great. Immediate action is needed. You need to act, make sense of the what you just did and respond. In chaos you want to get to complex as soon as you can. 9 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
In a complex system we: 1. start journeys with a general sense of direction but without precise targets. 2. have to be comfortable with what is inherent and unavoidable, uncertainty. 3. need real time feedback, with the flexibility to respond and change quickly. 4. can’t avoid some understanding of theory, which has to act as a enabling constraint on action. 5. are ethically responsible for the unintended consequence of any intervention__ 11 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
Some steps to take: 1. Identify what decision or challenge you are facing. 2. Determine where you might be in the framework :: Obvious, Complicated, Complex, Chaos. 3. Ask other people and gather feedback. 4. Based on where you feel you are ask yourself, your team, or other people: a. Confused – what do we want to have happen? How will we notice a difference? b. Clear – is there an obvious, written, tried and true best practice for our decision our challenge? c. Complicated – does someone outside our immediate team have expertise and expert knowledge of this type of challenge or decision? d. Complex – based on our time pressure and multiple right/wrong options how many experiments or tries can we make to better understand our decision or challenge? e. Chaos – When in chaos What immediate action can we take to stop this chaos? Before or planning chaos When this happens how will we best respond? 12 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
1.Frame the boundaries of the work. Where are the far edges that cannot be crossed? 2.Identify who or what will be affected by progress. How to best navigate these volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous changes. 3.Share all the factual data you can. Share all the good and bad, not just the good. 4.Do not attempt to interpret or serve as a subject-matter-expert who has to translate the data for people. Share the data in a format that others can understand and needs little to no expert opinion. Abstain from giving your expert advice. 5.Openly tell people that you do not know what to do, and we are here today to determine what we might do. Doing nothing is an option. 6.Identify things that are working well enough to make progress 7.Identify things that are not working well enough and are causing regress 13 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
8. Ask, from the things that are working what we can do more of? How? When? What will be measured? 9.Ask, from the things that are not working what we can do less of? How? When? What will be measured? 10.Commit to 1 area from what working to increase, and what is not working to decrease 11.Determine what you expect to learn from the commitment in #10. Write it down 12.Choose a date to meet and share what happened and what was learned 13.From what changed that works and does not work, determine how you did that. Assign one person to be responsible for understanding, learning and sharing what now works and does not work. Know you have some knowledge of a goal to be achieved. Determining goals that can be achieved only works when the goal has been achieved before, and we can diagram or understand how it happened the last time. 14.Ask, do we know enough to make this into a standard goal/ project plan? If yes, develop a project plan; if no, repeat from step #1 14 Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
17 Cynefin Resources: Books: Simple Habits for Complex Time by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston Obliquity – why our best goals are best achieved indirectly by John Kay Websites: https://cognitive-edge.com/resources/videos/ https://cognitive-edge.com/videos/cynefin-framework-introduction/ https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making Mike’s stuff: https://mikecardus.com/theory-change/ https://mikecardus.com/resilience-organizations/ https://mikecardus.com/bad-things-discussable/ https://mikecardus.com/business-weakness/ https://mikecardus.com/decision-making-antonyms-story-telling/ https://mikecardus.com/metaphors-complexity-change/ https://mikecardus.com/culture-change-people-interact/ https://mikecardus.com/change-current-environment/ https://mikecardus.com/goal-setting-in-a-changing-environment/ Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com
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