In the days before Richard Dawkins gained his Delusion(al) fame, he put forward a very useful metaphor for understanding complexity:

A dead parrot thrown up into the air obeys the laws of physics, forms a perfect parabola, and then falls back to earth. A live one disappears over the fence; its component parts working together to maintain their collective entity against the force of gravity.

This helps explain why, as managers, our employees/customers/suppliers don't "fall back to earth" like we'd like them to. We are dealing with levels of complexity in human systems that defy prediction and patterns of behaviour that defy causal links.

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Motivate staff, put in place better technology and improve facilities.

This is the solution our new director general of the Department of Home Affairs is placing his bets on in trying to root out corruption in the department. Sounds awfully simplistic to me! Are the efforts of "motivating staff, putting in place better technology and improving facilitates" not hygiene factors in making any organisation effective? Who says they are the solution to rooting out corruption?

How does this bloke know that this ploy will work? It sounds to me like he's under pressure to assert a strategy to deal with a heavily complex issue and has resorted to a simplistic answer that has sounded good in previous contexts. If only he had a way of exploring the problem to some degree of depth to see what emergent solutions might come about. Look, his solutions might be the right ones, but if he has not explored the context of the problem sufficiently, he runs the very real risk of applying "best practice" to a problems that it as averse to best practice as HIV/AIDS is averse to prevention.

This is the first time I'm blogging during a conference - I'll see if I can pay attention and write coherently at the same time. Instead of providing a chronological account of my time with Dave Snowden (founder of Cognitive Edge) over the next few days at Sonja's Dialogue conference in the Cognitive Edge Accreditation course.

I did the very same course roughly 18 months ago (after I had just read a couple of Dave's articles). It blew my hair back and am thankful I took some fairly rigorous notes. We're only 40mins into the day, but I can already see how Dave has improved in communicating the philosophy and background to his complex adaptive systems influences behind sense-making (making sense of the world so that we can act in it).

I do wonder though if I feel this way because I have journeyed with this thinking over the last year or so?

*He looks around the room*

Nope, people seem to be grasping this better than I did last year. Well done Dave!

Onto my next thought ...

Dee hock and his article:

http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/L2L/winter2000/hock.html 

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think and act anew.

Thanks Dave.  

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Sonja's comment

The word "complex" often finds its way into our daily conversations.

"So-and-so is a complex character"
"This is a complex issue"
"Gosh, how do we get around this complexity?"

And then, the same happens with the word "complicated". In fact, we probably use the terms interchangeably. Is there a difference? Well, the difference in the words lies in the difference between solving these two common scenarios:  read more »