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August 15 - October 10, 2022
One conclusion they reached was that agility and adaptability are normally limited to small teams. They explored the traits that make small teams adaptable, such as trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individual members to act.
the need to scale the adaptability and cohesiveness of small teams up to the enterprise level. This involves creating a team of teams to foster cross-silo collaboration.
Innovation and problem solving become the products of teamwork, not a single architect.
The role of the leader becomes creating the broader environment instead of command-and-control micromanaging.
The speed and interdependence of events had produced new dynamics that threatened to overwhelm the time-honored processes and culture we’d built.
The environment in which we found ourselves, a convergence of twenty-first-century factors and more timeless human interactions, demanded a dynamic, constantly adapting approach.
Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity
and continual change has become an imperative.
Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability in structures, processes, and mind-sets that is often uncomfortable.
There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.
The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.
The brutality and mayhem were strategic. Zarqawi’s goal was a sectarian civil war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia populations. In destroying each other, he thought, they would also destroy any remnant of a real state, thereby creating a window of opportunity for the Islamic caliphate of his dreams.
At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.
Likewise, economic systems—the products of complex knots of human factors—confound linear attempts at prediction and control.
“The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” he drew a distinction between “the degree of complexity characteristic of a peculiar kind of phenomenon” and “the degree of complexity to which, by a combination of elements, any kind of phenomena can be built up.”
“when China gets a cold . . . the US sneezes.”* To extend the Lorenz butterfly metaphor, we seem, increasingly, to live in a world of hurricanes.
But as Weaver pointed out, you cannot force the square peg of complexity into the round hole of the complicated.
The average forecasting error in the U.S. analyst community between 2001 and 2006 was 47 percent over twelve months and 93 percent over twenty-four months. As writer and investor James Montier puts it, “The evidence on the folly of forecasting is overwhelming .
It is hard, if not impossible, to draw a firm line separating the complicated from the complex. The different domains that deal with complexity use various taxonomies for differentiation.* For our purposes, the ability to predict is the most relevant criterion, and determining exactly when things become unpredictable is tricky. All the phenomena we have discussed are at some levels predictable: We can predict the rainfall in a particular city tomorrow with relative accuracy, just not in six months. We can reliably anticipate that inflation will cause shopkeepers to raise their prices this
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we can think of a phenomenon as exhibiting complexity over a given time frame if there are so many interactions that one cannot reasonably forecast the outputs based on the inputs. By this definition, weather would be complex over the time span of a day but not a month. This is why it is relevant not only that things have become more interconnected, but also that processes have become faster. These two variables combined mean that the amount of interactive complexity previously contained in many months of, say, local conversation and letter exchange might now be squeezed into a few hours of
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Big Data will not save us because the same technological advances that brought us these mountains of information and the digital resources for analyzing them have at the same time created volatile communication webs and media platforms, taking aspects of society that once resembled comets and turning them into cold fronts. We have moved from data-poor but fairly predictable settings to data-rich, uncertain ones.
more interdependent and fast-paced world.
state of complexity.
Complexity produces a fundamentally different situation from the complicated challenges of the past; complicated problems required great effort, but ultimately yielded to prediction. Complexity means that, in spite of our increased abilities to track and measure, the world has become, in many ways, vastly less predictable.
This unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction.
In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.
Scientist Brian Walker and writer David Salt, in their book on the subject, describe resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.”
In a complex world, disturbances are inevitable, making such a capacity to absorb shoc...
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Water has shaped everything about the Netherlands, from the postcard-pretty canals of Amsterdam to the country’s famously consensus-driven politics, a legacy of the cooperation required to drain large tracts of land.
Such predictive design is fine in complicated environments, but often dangerous in complex ones. While a “command and control” approach of high levees and floodwalls decreased the risk of small floods, it actually increased the risks of larger, more devastating floods, because it narrowed the channels of rivers, forcing the water to rise higher and flow faster. At the same time, due to subsidence, the land behind the dikes sank lower, and increasing numbers of people
moved into areas that had been floodplains, losing their sense of the natural dynamics of rivers. The Dutch department of water management estimates a river flood in Zeeland today could now put four million people at risk. The drive to optimize created a new type of threat.
“Room for the River,” the new water management plan for the region, reverses centuries of “command and control” responses to nature. It includes measures such as creating new bypasses and lowering dikes so that farmland along the rivers can serve as floodplains for the inevitable overflow of the rivers.
Though the concept’s popularity has increased in recent years, many resilience techniques are not new. In environmental infrastructure they often mark a return to the kind of cautious coexistence with nature that defined much of human history. Resilience thinkers argue that we have inadvertently “fragilized” many of the systems that surround us. Our urge to specialize, reap efficiencies, and impose our demands for unnatural predictability has, like the rerouting of the Rhine, created new threats and damaged our ability to bounce back.
Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. Our modus operandi is to break the things we’re managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs . . . [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system’s resilience.
making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.
“robust-yet-fragile”: man-made engineering feats like
the Delta Works that are brilliantly designed, ambitious in scale, but ultimately simpler, more mechanistic, and more rigid than the environment they attempt to regulate. Their robust responses to a single threat make them brittle and unresilient.
The focus of management for a century has been on efficiency: getting the most of a desired output (we can call this variable y) with the least of the available input (x).
The problem, as we discussed, is that you can only optimize for efficiency if you can identify x and y sufficiently far in advance to build a dependable system for converting one into the other; the pursuit of efficiency is grounded in prediction.
Peter Drucker had a catchy statement: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.” If you have enough foresight to know with certainty what the “right thing” is in advance, then efficiency is an apt proxy for effectiveness.
Our Task Force’s rigid top-to-bottom structure was a product of military history and military culture, and finding ways to reverse the information flow—to ensure that when the bottom spoke the top listened—was one of the challenges we would eventually have to overcome.
More difficult, however, was breaching the vertical walls separating the divisions of our enterprise.
Prediction is not the only way to confront threats; developing resilience, learning how to reconfigure to confront the unknown, is a much more effective way to respond to a complex environment.
Since the pursuit of efficiency can limit flexibility and resilience, the Task Force would have to pivot away from seeing efficiency as the managerial holy grail. To confront a constantly shifting threat in a complex setting, we would have to pursue adaptability.
Our foe, AQI, appeared to achieve this adaptability by way of their networked structure, which could organically reconfigure with surprising agility and resilience. We realized that in order to prevail, our Task Force would need to become a true network.
United 173 had crashed despite having an hour of spare fuel, no incapacitating technical issues, and clear protocols for dealing with a landing gear failure. US Airways 1549 saved all of its passengers and crew minutes after encountering an unprecedented and critical issue for which they had no technical preparation at all.
In 1978 airline crews were structured as a command: Malburn McBroom oversaw and divided responsibilities, assigned tasks, and issued orders in a system designed
for efficiency; in a crisis each and every crew member turned to him and awaited guidance. By 2009, effective airline crews were meant to function as teams—Sullenberger was a talented pilot who performed well under pressure, but if he had had to devise and issue individual sequential instructions to every member of the crew in the few minutes they had to act, Flight 1549 might not have made it.
Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.
“In competition, individual ambition serves the common good.”
