Arena: Navigating Complex Issues
Contents
1 Navigating Complex Issues
Complexity, as a disciplined set of practices, has emerged. We can move beyond fogging over, reducing our focus, or treating a complex issue as a problem.
There is a rational path to improve our position over time.
2 Barrier Analysis of Systemic Methods for Navigating Complex Issues
Unfamiliar practices that supplement conventional business practices can threaten individuals in leadership positions. The systemic principles and practices are counter-intuitive yet can predictably enable an organization to improve its position over time. There will be, however, predictable resistance.
Change requires insight, courage, and a willingness to learn.
3 Capacity of Our System
We invite others to share their knowledge when we do not pretend to know more than we do know. We seek diverse perspectives and are willing to explain why we think what we think. In a complex world, it is a rational posture.
To be intellectually humble is the signal of a reasonable person.
As we study complexity as a discipline, we need to be clear about distinguishing a complex issue from a complicated, chaotic, or routine issue. Each type of issue needs appropriate goals, organization, and leadership that is specific to the nature of the issue before us.
Complex issues have a set of distinct characteristics.
5 Comparing Complex Issues with Other Issues I
Building from David Snowden’s Sensemaking Framework, we work with a framework that helps us recognize variables, levels of uncertainty, whether the issue is chronic or episodic, and what goals make sense. Sorting issues using these characteristics builds confidence in and across teams or communities.
Each complex issue is unique to time, place, and participants.
Systemic Leadership enables appropriate methods, principles and practices for groups to predictably improve their position over time, relative to the complex issue. It
also furthers resilience and innovation, as the diversity of perspectives accelerates the knowledge sharing and enables new options for leaders.
Systemic practices for complexity include diversity, transparency, and candor.
Systemic methods are both supplementary to some conventional practices, and are at times, challenging to the status quo that traditionally has worked for routine issues. We need to look at conventional practices and switch to alternative postures and practices to work effectively with dynamic complex issues.
Clarifying where we need to shift enables the team to adapt.
Living systems share properties. We can utilize these properties to help organize our approach to complex issues. Systems have a purpose, boundaries, a hierarchy, coherence, and emergence. They exist within a suprasystem and within them exist learning subsystems, humans who can cooperate.
Complexity can be confusing without having a systems view.
Families are dynamic living systems. Individual humans are dynamic living systems. Both are complex, and we can learn from the comparisons.
Properties of dynamic living systems provide insight into complex issues.
Systemic methods have the potential to transform our approach to complex issues. They function in a pre- hypothesis mode using disciplined practices that do not attempt to finalize any given fact, but rather to generate new options from the collective experiences of diverse participants. They align with the nature of complexity, itself.
Systemic and scientific methods are principled and disciplined practices.
Managers need to lead systems changes within their organizations. For example, adding patterning to logic opens the doors to unseen options. Adding emergence to extrapolation moves beyond replication to organic growth and imagination. Effective managers will recognize that additional practices enrich the capacity of the organization to navigate complexity, and set about learning by doing with their teams.
New practices will liberate energy and talent, bringing hope.
Bruce McKenzie’s pioneering work in complexity guides us to see the patterns that support our deepening understanding of the complex issue before us. Rich picturing enables all diverse participants to share what they know, and we then make sense and identify patterns and emergence. Further steps give us confidence that we’re tapping the experiential knowledge available to generate better options.
A roadmap can give us confidence that we know what to do next.
Fully drawing the resources of diverse participants, systemic methods abide by clear practices. For example, without diversity, we end up with old thinking. Without candor, people do not feel free to share what they know. Without designing time to think, people offer underdeveloped responses. Specific practices are essential to optimizing the collective experience of the participants.
Systemic methods are sensitive if they are to yield top results.
We live with the legacy of “command and control” hierarchy for all issues facing the organization. People are not used to telling the truth at work, and so they need to be protected. Independent judgment conflicts with what the “higher ups” might say, so people withhold ideas. With complex issues, this legacy handcuffs us. We need to take on practices and habits by designing experiences that release the experiential knowledge of all participants as equals.
Default organizational practices handicap our efforts with complex issues.
15 Diversity of Perspectives
In today’s complex world, the biggest category of things includes what we don’t know that we don’t know. Each of us has a unique perspective, and to expand and create a richer picture of what is real and important, we need to invest in bringing diverse perspectives to support us.
Each of us is limited to our unique perspective, which is but a thin slice of reality.
16 The Logic and Conditions for Tapping Experiential Learning
Within our staff, there are reservoirs of knowledge and experience that are untapped. In daily life, learning within the organization and within the broader environment is happening. We can tap this and engage our people. We can fail to tap it and it becomes stagnant and erodes morale. Practices exist that are not burdensome that liberate these resources to serve the organization.
Hidden reservoirs of knowledge can be released.
17 Rich Picturing: Conversation Mapping
Conversation mapping is a technique developed by Bruce McKenzie and has been used globally for decades. People read and write, moving to various tables with unique challenges and “conversations” emerging at each table. They become investigative journalists to identify patterns, themes, and emergent new ideas. These are the first steps to tapping experiential knowledge.
Participants thoroughly enjoy Conversation Mapping and learn!
18 Rich Picturing: Narrative Gathering
Stories are embedded with rich information. Narrative Gathering is a disciplined way of capturing some of the important ideas and patterns from stories that are shared around a table. People have the opportunity to tell their story when they are ready, and to listen and learn about the experiences of others, related to the complex issue that is facing the group.
All of us know more than any of us; stories illuminate facets.
19 Speed Stating
Often we sit through meetings or presentations, and each of us is thinking, but there is no opportunity to share. Speed Stating was developed by Bruce McKenzie as a way to enable everyone to share from his or her unique perspective, and be of service to the other members of the group. It is a highly popular systemic technique.
Speed stating enables us to share unique perspectives quickly and painlessly.
20 Opportunity Statements
Based on Rich Picturing activities, pairs of participants identify a theme or pattern and craft an opportunity statement to share. They need to include “What is your idea for improvement?” (This can be a small or big step). “How would it work?” “Why would it help?” Pairs can create as many opportunity statements as they like. They learn together through the process how to best explain their thinking.
Opportunity statements enable each participant to make a unique contribution.
21 Three Horizon Mapping
Many group processes break down when it comes to aggregating the ideas of many participants. The Three Horizon Map that Bruce McKenzie developed sets up a way for the creators of the ideas to place them on a matrix, based on their sense of time and necessary resources.
Trusting the pairs to organize their ideas forces a decision.
22 Three Horizon Mapping – Strategic Staircasing
The next step in systemic exploration developed by Bruce McKenzie (Australia) is called Strategic Staircasing. When all of the ideas from the group have been posted, small groups begin to backcast and identify prerequisites to big goals that will only be accomplished later. Multiple staircases can be identified and contribute to strategic planning.
Back-casting enables the group to self-organize and own their pathways.
23 Coherence Mapping
Within departments, silos, individuals, and teams at work within organizations, it is easy for things to become disjointed and suboptimize the groups’ efforts. Coherence Mapping was developed by Bruce McKenzie and enables the parties to come together, ahead of breakdowns, and build a foundation through specific communication techniques that share crucial information in a positive way.
Anticipatory design saves losses in navigating complex issues.
24 Coherence Mapping Matrix
Identifying “Who needs what from whom?” is the foundation of a Coherence Map Matrix. The process engages diverse participants from each “silo” or group, and identifies needs. This enables everyone to see who is under-resourced, who could meet needs now that they know about them, and where gaps are that could be addressed by others.
Systemic improvements are enabled by specific techniques.
25 WindTunneling Analog
This technique was developed by Bruce McKenzie (Australia). WindTunneling was originally designed to test strategies against a variety of plausible future events, enabling the group to modify strategies to be more resilient. WindTunneling enabled a major bank to identify a massive collapse before it happened. The technique enabled a major company to build redundancies that enabled them to survive a “Black Swan” event.
Originally, WindTunneling was done with groups in person.
26 WindTunneling.com
WindTunneling is a new social form that manifests in an on- line Complexity Toolkit. Tapping into the power of disciplined practices coupled with tapping diverse experiential knowledge provides a fruitful field of refreshing insights for all participants.
WindTunneling is a powerful toolset for innovation, resilience, and strategy.