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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?
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Sonja Blignaut
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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https://youtu.be/epXqgrm2hs4
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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__
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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?
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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
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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
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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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Mike Cardus - www.MikeCardus.com