Navigating Complexity: A New Map for a New Territory

Larry Clark

It’s an odd fact that, in the U.S., the most common street name is Second Street, appearing in 10,866 U.S. municipalities, according to the National League of Cities. (First Street is the third most common, at just over 9,000 occurrences — go figure).  As luck would have it, I recently had to navigate to an address on Second Street in a nearby city. Not paying close attention to the search results in my GPS, I selected a result and proceeded to the address on Second Street – two towns away from where I wanted to go.

My challenge wasn’t that I didn’t know my destination. I was just using the wrong map.

In a similar way, navigating complexity successfully doesn’t start with new skills or behaviors. It starts with using the right map – one that accurately describes the territory of complexity and provides an approach to working through complex situations differently from other types of business challenges.

In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, David Snowden and Mary E. Boone showed us just such a map – the Cynefin Framework. Snowden’s Cynefin (pronounced kuh-NEV-in) Framework has been gaining popularity recently because of its practical, straightforward approach for categorizing situations and identifying strategies to address them.

The Cynefin Framework sorts situations into four key categories:

• Simple: Situations that can be addressed with good instructions, checklists, or best practices.  Assembling a piece of furniture from a kit is an example.
• Complicated: Situations in which cause and effect can be known up front but may require significant effort and/or domain expertise to address. Things like putting a rocket into space, or even fixing a chronic engine problem in your car, would fit in the Complicated category. Up until recently, most business challenges fell into this category, so the mindset and tools we use for problem analysis and decision-making best fit Complicated situations.
• Complex: Here’s where it gets interesting. These are situations in which outcomes cannot be accurately predicted – where the relationship between cause and effect cannot be known until after the fact – regardless of the level of expertise or effort invested in the solution. Politics, your favorite sporting event and raising children all fall into this category. These situations require a completely different approach and toolkit from Complicated situations.
• Chaotic: These are situations in which the relationship between cause and effect is unclear, even after the fact. In military terms, Chaotic conditions are sometimes described as “the fog of war.”  Battlefield settings and natural disasters can fall into this category.

A more complete description of the Cynefin Framework is well beyond the scope of this blog post, but what is so powerful about the Cynefin Framework is it shows us that complex challenges are not harder, crunchier versions of complicated situations. You don’t just put in more hours or assign more consultants to brute-force your way through them. You navigate them differently because they are different territory.

Because complex situations or problems require a different approach to address them – an approach that requires experimentation and the capacity to allow a path forward to emerge over time – the common cause-and-effect thinking and tools that leaders use to fix problems don’t create the results they expect — just like finding yourself on Second Street, but in the wrong city.

In future posts, we will explore some of the tools used to navigate complexity. But it all starts with knowing where you are, and that is the biggest change for leaders. With a new map, leaders can begin to explore the new territory before them.

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Navigating Complexity: Managing Polarities

Larry Clark

In a previous post, I shared that navigating complexity requires us to trade in our traditional cause-and-effect, problem-solving mindset map for something that accurately depicts the new territory of complexity. Today, I want to dig into one of the best examples of the new territory—managing polarities. Thinking in terms of polarities is a critical shift leaders need to make to navigate complexity, and it is an important element of any leadership development strategy.

Polarities and Paradox

What is a polarity?

A polarity, or paradox, is a situation in which opposing forces within a system pull at each other to keep things balanced.

But, like inhaling and exhaling, each “pole” can’t exist without the other. Polarities are everywhere because we live in a complex world. In business, centralization versus decentralization or growth versus profit maximization are common examples of polarities. In life, think work-life balance or liberal versus conservative. A natural tension exists between the two that will always be there—it’s an attribute of the system.

But we humans are uncomfortable with that tension. In fact, it makes us so uncomfortable that we see it as a problem. And what do we do with problems? We solve them. For example, a new HQ executive sees too much inconsistency in the field, so she starts a “One-[insert company name]” initiative to centralize decision making. Consistency improves, but the company gradually loses connection with local markets. Three years later, a new executive comes to headquarters from the field, and, seeing this new “problem,” he embarks on a by-the-field/for-the-field initiative to empower local leadership in order to drive decisions. And, inevitably, this new “solution” results in creative approaches that work in isolation but don’t scale across the business. I bet you can guess what the next leader does. And so the pendulum swings, from one pole to the other, as each new leader tries to “problem-solve” away what is just the natural tension in the system.

When you first begin to understand polarities, it’s kind of like when you buy a blue Honda. You never really noticed them much before, but now you’re seeing blue Hondas everywhere. Because polarities are embedded in the landscape, we tend to think their symptoms are just traditional problems. As leaders begin to see how pervasive they are and that they bring tension and bad outcomes but cannot be solved as problems, it can leave them more than a little unsettled.

Addressing Polarities with Both/And Thinking

To help, we as learning leaders, can begin to bring to our organization a new way of thinking and leading. In their August 2022 article, “Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift,” for Harvard Business Review, Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith discuss the necessity to shift from either/or thinking to both/and thinking.

They state that great leaders “recognize the paradoxes that underlie their tensions and instead adopt both/and thinking. Rather than choose between the options, they embrace competing demand simultaneously.”

In the article, they outline three key shifts in a leader’s approach to polarities and paradoxical situations.

Three key shifts in a leader’s approach to polarities and paradoxical situations

• Surfacing Tensions: People with a “paradox mindset” know that tensions exist in the landscape and actively seek them out. Smith and Lewis recommend that a good way to surface these tensions is to “surround yourself with people of varying, even opposing views.”
• Embracing Tensions: Polarities and paradoxes require leaders to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with the natural tension in the system, avoiding the pull to make a decision just to get closure. Even when decisions are made, new information may require new thinking. “Both/and thinkers often are very clear about the big picture and an overarching higher purpose, but they know that achieving this aim requires some consistently inconsistent decision making.”
• Processing Tensions: Managing tension is an ongoing balancing process, requiring scanning for information “to see how opposing ideas are distinct and different, while at the same time looking to identify how they can be linked and synergistic. They separate and connect.” In their 2022 HBR Press book, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Smith and Lewis point to the polarity mapping process by Barry Johnson as an approach to clearly define polarity and manage it over time.

I have had the opportunity to work through polarity mapping processes with teams in conflict, and the results can be eye-opening. In one exercise, I was helping a group of field technical leaders define how to balance centralized and decentralized management of their technology platform. As they worked through the process, it was as if they started to see the situation clearly for the first time and understand why all their previous efforts had failed.

Both/And Thinking as Part of Leadership Fitness

In our Harvard Business Publishing study on Human-Centered Leadership (HCL), we surfaced four leadership capacities that, taken together, we refer to as the four dimensions of leadership fitness—dimensions that were key not only to HCL but also to overall leadership effectiveness in times of challenge and complexity. We refer to this both/and thinking approach as the capacity of balance—a critical mindset to see and manage organizations’ complex dynamics, which have become commonplace today.

Paradoxical leadership feels very different to the uninitiated. And if you think I’m asking you to tell leaders to go out and create a little “crazy” in the organization, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s our job to help them see that the crazy has been here for a while, it isn’t planning on going anywhere, and it offers new opportunities if we see it through the right frame of mind. If we stick to our old ways of problem-solving our way through paradoxical situations, we aren’t just ineffective—we lose out on the opportunity to create value in ways that our current approaches could never achieve.

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To learn more about our study on developing human-centered leaders who drive employee fulfillment, download our report “Leadership Fitness: The Path to Developing Human-Centered Leaders Who Drive Employee Fulfillment” now.

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Navigating Complexity: Football, Floor Space, and the Art of the Experiment

Larry Clark

In my first post on complexity, I referenced the Cynefin Framework and how it distinguishes between complicated situations (like launching a rocket into space) and complex situations (like raising my teenage daughter). And my second post just scratched the surface of polarities and paradox. A key concept of complexity that underpins both posts is the idea of emergence—an impressive word for “we don’t really know what’s going to happen until we see it start to happen.”

Emergence as the New Normal

Take a National Football League game in the U.S.—a great illustration of emergence. In the average game, both teams combined run about 130 plays. It is impossible for a team to predict how many plays they will get to run during a game, let alone map out the order of the plays the team will execute. The coaching staff comes into the game with a set of ideas about the opposing team’s strengths and weaknesses, a set of strategies they think will work, and a well-rehearsed playbook. And then, they embark on a 60-minute, play-by-play experiment—seeing what’s working and exploiting it, seeing what doesn’t and avoiding it, and allowing the game to unfold.

NFL coaches are not just experts at football. They also have a highly developed capacity for working in an environment of emergence—seeing the system and how it is operating, aligning the team around a changing strategy, and conducting real-time experiments to advance to a win.

Now contrast this with what we’ve taught leaders for years about things like developing three-year strategies, building annual plans and budgets months before the fiscal year starts, and implementing large-scale changes. Our historical approach to these management practices is rooted in an unspoken assumption: If you’re an effective leader, you should be able to predict the future. But more and more, we see the paint chipping off this kind of thinking, revealing the unavoidable truth underneath. We ask leaders to manage in a way that is fundamentally out of sync with a complex world where, like NFL football, the game can change with every play.

Embracing Emergence Through Experiments

But that doesn’t mean we can’t plan. What it does mean is that we ask leaders to experiment—to test the ideas in their plans, to learn from the tests, and to adapt to what they learn. And keep on testing. Experiments can be highly structured and formal for important changes and decisions, and they can be part of a mindset that is used for day-to-day decision-making.

For example, the Harvard Business Review article “The Discipline of Business Experimentation” describes an approach for conducting effective experiments. In one example, the retail chain Kohl’s conducted an experiment across 100 stores to learn if they could open an hour later with no appreciable reduction in store revenue (it turns out they could). In another experiment, they tested a pet project of several executives—selling furniture—to see if it could increase revenue (it actually reduced revenue because of the amount of retail floor space it consumed).

Failure is Good

One final point: A key part of making the shift from rigid planning to experimentation is creating an environment where people see the failure of an experiment as a good thing. An experiment is not a “pilot” to test the implementation of an idea we’ve already decided to implement. It is a learning exercise to test the idea itself. So the outcome is learning, which is useful whether the experiment fails or succeeds. Building a safe environment for experimentation means creating safe-to-fail experiments and rewarding teams for the learnings from experiments instead of the results.

So here’s a way learning leaders can model this new world of emergence and experimentation. If you are implementing action learning projects or other types of on-the-job experiences in your leadership development work, how about having your leaders run experiments instead of implementing projects?

In these three posts, we’ve just begun to poke around the edges of the topic of complexity. My hope is that we as learning leaders can begin a broader dialogue on complexity and help each other go deeper into this rich topic.

What other aspects of complexity should we explore to help your leaders better navigate today’s business world?

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