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  Working with Complexity

  If you make it so, complexity could actually be your friend. Complex adaptive systems are best understood by stepping back to look at the whole. Unlike the direct, consistent patterns of linear systems, reactions and responses in complex adaptive systems are more likely to vary, depending on changing situations. A CEO might make a statement during a meeting on Monday that’s met with applause, and then the same comment on Friday elicits boos. Actions, reactions, and implications are not static, which can create perplexing ambiguity. You can never know for sure whether what worked before will work now or in the future.

  Meta-leaders, because of their focus on both the big picture and its components, better grasp the puzzle that is complexity. With a worldview filtered through the lens of a complex adaptive system, they perceive both the transforming whole and the changing linkages between the parts it comprises. For those who hope to spearhead change, a meta-perspective is essential.

  The key here is to look for patterns that help you figure out how to remove obstacles and guide interactions to shape conditions for success. What are the variables—economic, political, emotional—that currently affect what is happening, and why? What is more important, what is less important, and how are your priorities changing? As you leverage connections among the parts, ask: what are people doing, and does it shift how others behave? When you perceive these changes, you better understand where they lead and how they affect what you and others do and accomplish. Sometimes you spark the changes. Other times you go with the flow. And if you succeed, people follow you—or not. Complexity often poses difficult choices.

  When you view your leadership through the lens of complexity, you realize that people and actions do not always follow what you initially expect. Seek patterns that clue you in.

  Here is a hypothetical example of leading a complex organization, based on our field research. You are recruited as the new executive director of a company. The number-two person hoped for and did not get your job. You question whether to keep her on or find someone else. Is she on your side or acting to undermine your authority and your initiatives? This is not a simple boss-subordinate “do as I tell you” situation.

  Becoming a detective, you open a dialogue trying to discern her intentions. She also has institutional knowledge that could be valuable. You’d like to make this arrangement work, so you provide opportunities for her to show what she can do, but she fails to produce. There are problems she is aware of, and she does not follow protocol to let you know about them. After talking to her colleagues, you hear about some negative chatter she generated that others find disturbing. The pattern is clear. You weigh your options and act. It’s time to find someone else to do the job.

  It’s a common mistake in organizations to attempt to solve complex problems with simple solutions. Constant reorganizations that shuffle the reporting structure and responsibilities fail because they attempt to make the dynamic static. The human brain simply cannot design an organization—particularly one in the ever-changing knowledge economy—that reflects the complexity of its actual functions. There are too many variables to script every interaction.

  The people-intensive, linear bureaucracies that created efficiencies and productivity in the twentieth-century industrial age are now being replaced by the predictive algorithms of the twenty-first-century digital age. These technologies expand the automated decision-making that is best left to machines. Increasingly, what is left for humans is creativity, innovation, and knowledge-sharing—all of which burst the bounds of mechanistic rules in their dynamism and variability.

  How is this shift reflected in your behavior as a leader? When seeking solutions, you realize that no one has all the necessary information, yet anyone may have some part of it. Ask questions. Analyze. Seek explanations and options that fit the situation at hand, not the situation as you would like to see it. Answers to complex problems do not arrive in simple packages. You observe and assess ever-evolving relationships between the parts because changing outcomes result from those many interactions.

  Complexity is. Embracing those two simple words is the first step toward understanding the dynamic environment of leadership. Complexity is not something to be solved. It is not a condition that can be cured. You can’t make it go away. You can, however, navigate through it.

  Finding Order

  Complexity offers choice. The meta-leader promotes order amid complexity and encourages followers to do so as well. Order can be achieved through patterns of communication, decision-making, and action-response arrangements, offering a measure of predictability and stability in a system. With order, you clarify what you expect of others and what they can expect of you. You can then direct how to logically get things done, figuring out who does what, when, and where. Order helps you gauge the delicate balance between complexity and simplicity. How do you best grasp your options to arrive at the best possible choices?

  The transformative leader finds patterns in a situation and then takes action to generate new patterns, initiating a fresh and different order. Ideally, your intervention accomplishes the intended changes. For example, a proactive crisis plan establishes order through clear roles and responsibilities, need-based resource allocation, and transparent protocols and actions. In the face of an impending catastrophic hurricane, authorities designate beforehand who will do what, how emergency supplies will be distributed, and how and where shelters will be established. Potential chaos is transformed into order.

  How can a better understanding of order help you meta-lead through complexity? Order and disorder lie on a continuum. Our brains order information and emotions to make sense of what we experience. Consider people you know: some are “neat freaks,” craving coherent order. Others deride such concerns and are not bothered by their messy desks. These individuals nevertheless have an order to the apparent madness of their environment, assuring you that “I know where everything is!” What they resist is control—order imposed and defined by someone else.

  Achieving a measure of order—beginning to discern patterns in a situation—boosts both productivity and predictability. Too much order, however, can stifle creativity, adaptability, and the capacity to engage complexity.

  Don’t let yourself get frazzled by disorder. One part of your meta-leading through complexity is facing up to disorder as a step toward shaping new order. This is where many leaders fail. They panic, unable to assess the true complexity of what is happening. Disrupting current patterns without a better alternative makes things worse. Change for the sake of change is not necessarily an improvement on what is already in place.

  Chaos, residing at the extreme disorder end of the order-disorder continuum, is an unavoidable element of highly complex scenarios. It is the necessary scrambling of order as a system moves from stable state A to stable state B. All change involves a measure of chaos. Chaos can be uncomfortable, confusing, frightening, and often unpredictable. But chaos is not “bad” by definition. Like complexity, it simply is. Some chaos descends upon people as a natural disaster—a hurricane, pandemic, or earthquake. Other chaos is human-made, such as terrorism, revolt, a market crash, or a budget shortfall.

  Leaders with an ambitious change agenda even provoke strategic chaos at times to overcome the prevailing social, economic, or political order. Just as order has its functions, so does chaos. Changing the office floor plan to encourage greater interaction and creativity introduces an element of chaos into a physical work space. Protesters stop traffic in the midst of the holiday shopping season to bring attention to their cause. A senior leader ignores the usual formal reporting chain and meets with frontline workers to learn how things are going. All these are examples of a measure of disorder designed to generate a new order.

  There are many ways to assemble or reassemble order. Control is one way. A command-and-control hierarchy maps clear lines of authority. Information technology controls the flow of data, knowledge, and communication. Laws, rules, and procedures lik
ewise seek to assert control over what can and cannot be done. At the extreme, the fear of chaos is leveraged by political and organizational leaders to justify strict or even authoritarian control. Repressive rulers try to suppress complexity by imposing strict control.

  No one fully controls a complex adaptive system. The drive for control can actually lessen chances of success. Overbearing controls rarely solve a problem and often make it worse. Rigid business processes, for example, can stifle an organization’s adaptability. Political repression often prompts rebellion and further chaos.

  Though people appreciate order, few like to be controlled. It generates pushback.

  What is the alternative?

  Meta-leaders, with their big-picture view of the system, its evolution, and its people, assert control when it advances order. They reduce control when it detracts from order. They find that point of equilibrium in any given situation.

  One way to accomplish order is to exercise influence rather than exert authority. You can engage people by shaping and clearly articulating a purpose that rallies their voluntary engagement and action. Engaging people is different from commanding them. When you get their buy-in, people come together because they believe in the mission and want to contribute and be included. They see how to add order, and they do it enthusiastically. In the absence of rigid top-down control, they are free to increase their adaptive capacity to meet challenges. Remember the swarm intelligence that manifested during the Boston Marathon bombings response? It exhibited a high degree of order beyond control.

  As a meta-leader, you attract people to willingly follow you. They are encouraged by your character, values, and purpose. The magnetism of such leadership is more compelling than control.

  The transformation of FEMA exemplifies what it means to meta-lead a complex adaptive system. In the wake of major disasters, FEMA is responsible for guiding and coordinating federal relief activities—helping to restore order in the midst of chaos.

  In 2005, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA’s poorly coordinated response compounded the chaos of the disaster. It was a crucible moment for emerging leadership in the United States. We were on-scene, interacting with leaders. We saw that, while so much had been to done to ready agencies for an event of this scale. Even so, when it mattered most the system and its leaders could not meet the needs of the people in the affected areas.

  Changing the culture and performance of FEMA was a priority for the new Obama administration in 2009. From 2009 to 2014, Rich Serino, a colleague and an alum of our NPLI executive crisis leadership program, served as FEMA deputy administrator. While at FEMA, he and Administrator Craig Fugate transformed the focus of the agency’s work. The intent was to redefine the agency’s mission, its operations, and confidence in the agency. The implicit premise was that restoring order amid chaos required the collaboration of many different agencies, communities, and people. Alignment of their efforts could not be commanded, though it could be coordinated.

  The leaders recognized that FEMA needed first to refocus itself and its priorities. Previously, those affected by a disaster were referred to as victims. Leaders changed the term to survivors. Victims are people who died. Survivors are active participants in the recovery and resilience of their lives and communities. Characterizing the agency as survivor-centric prompted changes in rules, protocols, the redesign of Disaster Recovery Centers, relationships with nongovernmental organizations, and more.

  The redefinition of those directly affected by disasters was accompanied by another change in perspective: FEMA reoriented itself to prepare and support the “whole community” during a disaster. This wider meta-view of its mission and operation reordered how FEMA engaged other agencies and communities in times of crisis. By convening rather than commanding the “whole of community,” FEMA was better able to connect with and support a vast array of government, business, community, and nonprofit organizations, all eager to assist. FEMA became the connective tissue in the response network, catalyzing these other entities into force multipliers for a wide enterprise of people and organizations. No one did everything and everyone did something to contribute to the whole that was accomplished. Encouraging these partnerships was far different from commanding and controlling. With that, FEMA stimulated greater order and far better alignment of support to survivors. Businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and young people—the new FEMA Corps—wanted in, and the agency was there to welcome and facilitate their meaningful contributions.

  In reorienting and revitalizing its purpose, the agency redefined the balance between form and function. In bureaucratic institutions, which tend to cling to form, you often hear comments like, “This is how we’ve always done it,” or, “I don’t make the rules, I just work here.” The agency had been a typically bureaucratic institution in that form dominated its thinking and operations.

  Organizations that deliver breakthrough services and products that truly engage employees and delight customers are open to adapting form to serve function. Their bottom line is: what are we here to do, and what is the best way to get it done? Rather than trying to fit their purposes into rigid structures and rules, they cultivate and choose organizational strategies, decision-making practices, and lines of communication that support organizational objectives. They enable self-organization in the pursuit of those objectives. Function eclipses form.

  This is what leaders accomplished at FEMA after 2009. Rich Serino recounted his experience bringing private-sector representatives into the FEMA National Response Coordination Center (NRCC). Up to that point, they had been excluded. “At least 95 percent of commerce is run by the private sector, and so they had to be in the NRCC to coordinate responses at national, state, and local levels,” Serino said. “I was told, ‘We can’t do that because it’s against the law.’ So I said, ‘Show me the law.’ There was no law. Then they said, ‘It’s a policy.’ So I said, ‘Okay, show me the policy.’ There was no policy. ‘It’s just how we do things’ I was told. So I said, ‘Now we’re going to do things differently.’ And so we brought representatives of the private sector into the NRCC, and it really made a difference.”

  Rich saw FEMA’s role as helping to restore community function for survivors. By the time Rich left FEMA, every rule and protocol was regularly being reviewed for relevancy and usefulness. Those found to be deficient in this regard automatically came off the books.

  Forces of Crisis, Change, and Meta-Leadership

  In any complex system, there are forces for you, forces against you, and forces on the fence. The wide meta-view of leadership encourages you to see, understand, and weigh how these many different forces affect what you and others do. Some of these forces you control. Many you don’t. That is what makes them so complex.

  These forces are both tangible and intangible. Obvious forces, such as finances, assets, and equipment, can help or hinder your efforts. More subtle factors also come into play, such as opinions, friendships, personalities, and external developments, some quite distant. Some forces are even internal to you as leader, such as your knowledge, experience, and emotional intelligence.

  The “forces for” include allies, the power of your ideas and information, and the resources, whether of money or goodwill, that you accumulate. These forces amplify your message and efforts, and the more you have, the more energy is available to accomplish your meta-leadership objectives. Be careful, though: misperceiving or embellishing just how much force you have can lead to overconfidence and jeopardize your efforts.

  The “forces against” are your enemies and the assets, information, and support they bring to resisting what you hope to accomplish. Your own internal blinders can also work as a force against you if you are unwilling to challenge your own thinking. Other “forces against” include the comfort of the status quo and people who see a loss for themselves in what you hope to accomplish. Together, these forces can stop or certainly frustrate you.

  The “forces on the fence” are all those stakehol
ders and factors not committed to one side or the other. These forces are negotiable, open to persuasion to lean in either direction. These uncommitted forces are often substantial. Recruit the relevant ones and you win. Lose them and you don’t.

  Driving Your Knowns

  These different combinations of forces define the contours of the complexity you face. What you know and what you don’t know are both key to deciphering that complexity. Your objective as a meta-leader is building and executing a disciplined, intentional process that drives you and others toward what is knowable. You pursue and gather as much situation-relevant knowledge as possible. You do that grasping that much is unknown in what you face, and also that some of the knowledge you don’t have is knowledge you can acquire. Through this analysis, you grasp what you know and commit to the pursuit of additional knowledge.

  There are four categories for what you know and what you don’t know:

  1. The known knowns: These are the tangible facts that you are aware of and that you use in your meta-leadership thinking. The more you know, the better your strategy, decisions, and actions.

  2. The known unknowns: You are aware of what you don’t know, the questions to ask, and of whom to ask them. This is accessible knowledge and information that you assemble.

  3. The unknown knowns: Additional information is available that may be hidden and outside your awareness. Seeking this knowledge is vital; without it, you could unexpectedly stumble.

  4. The unknown unknowns: These are abstract factors that you may not even think to think about. Imagination is required. Unknown unknowns could include critical knowledge that has bearing on the situation.

  On the afternoon of September 13, 2018, a nearly simultaneous series of explosions ripped through forty structures in three Merrimack Valley towns north of Boston. For the emergency response leaders in the first moments, the known knowns were the multiple 911 calls reporting explosions and fires in rapid succession; the known unknowns were the extent of injuries and the damage to the many affected structures; the unknown knowns were the cause or causes of the explosions and whether they were related; and the unknown unknown was what could happen next. Through a quick and continual knowledge acquisition process, leaders drove accumulating information into the known known. It was soon learned that the cause was an overpressurized natural gas pipeline. Ultimately, the objective of the knowledge acquisition process is to learn fully what happened and then to take steps to ensure that it does not happen again.