What makes a system complex is not the presence of many agents, but the fact that these agents adapt to and interact with one another in a way that creates unpredictable consequences.#1066•
For Holland, understanding the interaction of adaptive agents is critical to solving some of the most important problems of the twenty-first century. These adaptive agents and their interactions are at the core of complexity.#1080•
You would think with the clarity I have about the clear and present dangers all around us, my fellow leaders would be all about trying new things, investing in new things, figuring out the future core of the business, and so on. But we've been a quarterly-run business forever, and I haven't changed that.
We have too many priorities that we're trying to execute when we only have capacity for doing a small fraction of them well, at most.
Our team spends too much of our time putting out fires, and we aren't internalizing that the entire platform we're standing on is burning.#1089•
What these three heroes need is the capability to make frequent, fast, and effective pauses that successfully set the new and right course while simultaneously mobilizing people for effective, efficient, and sustained execution#971•
We can master highly sophisticated technical and technological challenges because we're quite skilled at making linear connections from one technical feat to the next. But complex, multidimensional challenges are categorically different. They are not linear. They are not solved or even solvable through technical prowess.
They don't stand still.
They don't patiently await solutions.
Complexity is a whole different ball game.#956•
Too many factors are at play (known and unknown) that haven't been identified, let alone mastered; rather than linear and observable, the chain of causation is dynamic and obscure. On top of all this, the human factor is different with every complex challenge. People in a given organization may possess silo mentalities, harbor different objectives, and be resistant to change; they may also be ambitious and politically motivated.
Thus, a solution that worked in one place at one time won't necessarily work somewhere else or even in the same place at another time, even when the complex challenge seems to be the same on the surface.#969•
Broadly speaking, challenges are either:
1.Technical in nature, mechanistic, orderly, linear, and completely predictable.
Simple and complicated challenges are technical in nature. Straight-line, step-by-step solutions can be implemented by anyone (simple), or by experts with the necessary expertise (complicated). You solve simple challenges on your own regularly. For complicated challenges, you either solve them on your own if you happen to have the expertise, or, more often than not, you solve the problem by getting experts to do for you what they've done for others many times before.
2.Creative in nature, unscientific, messy, unstable, and unpredictable.#1018•
Complex challenges require innovative responses. These are the confounding head-scratchers with no right answers, only best attempts. There is no straight line to a solution, and you can only know that you've found an effective strategy in retrospect. Your complex challenges are never really solved; you grope your way forward and see how it goes.#1071•
Anyone can solve simple challenges by following a checklist. Complicated challenges are best addressed by experts who follow an explicit or implicit checklist and apply "gray hair" expertise. For complex challenges, experts can never guarantee success because a step-by-step solution doesn't exist.#1029•
Complexity is where only high-variety talent, rapid leaps forward, and trial and error can enable success.#1024•
In the complicated domain, knowledge is power; in the complex domain, a fully tapped diversity of talent is power#990•
To paraphrase a famous quote from journalist and scholar H. L. Mencken: "To every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."#973•
Complexity does that to you: You knew what you were doing, but what used to work doesn't anymore.#981•
While simple and complicated challenges trace out a straight line in terms of progression from state to state, the number of possible states for complex challenges grows exponentially. And they can get out of hand quickly—spiraling up, spiraling down. Don't try to predict the states and chart out the steps.
You're dealing with too many: factors; interdependencies between factors and steps; forces at play; unknowns and even more unknown unknowns.#1040•
Most organizations weren't designed for these times. Their various processes—core business, decision making, financial, innovation, procurement, talent (and so on)—are not agile, distributed, or capable of acceleration when needed; they certainly aren't real-time and continuously running. They are linear in nature and capable of linear pace only.#1072•
Solving complexity comes down to mastering co-creation in large groups. Handling complexity as if it is merely complicated doesn't work. Getting better doesn't get you ahead. Getting incrementally faster isn't fast enough. A bit leaner isn't lean enough. Somewhat more agile isn't agile enough.#1063•
The paradigm shift requires you to stop working under the false premise that the solution to complexity resides within a small, scarce pool of talent. Tapping into the abundance of talent available to every organization puts you on the right path to solutions.#1096•
Breakthroughs occur when you are able to systematically accelerate the progress that large, high-variety groups of people can make, while also setting them up for effective execution of what they've co-created—with unprecedented speed and effectiveness.#985•
Chapter 2
It is known as Ashby's Law or the Law of Requisite Variety: "Only variety destroys variety."
Complex challenges are high variety: Lots of moving parts, lots of dots to connect, lots of factors at play, lots of interconnections and compounding, many facets to be considered and implications to be taken into account. If you're going to deal with all that at once, Ashby's Law says you need to bring a matching amount of variety to the solving process.#1083•
Trivia contests are clearly a domain where only variety destroys variety—the higher variety the team, the more likely they will collectively know (or successfully guess at) the answers. Time and again, a table full of complete strangers will outperform a table full of family members or friends who likely have too much in common to carry enough variety for the questions thrown at them.#1019•
The absorbing of implications and the thinking about what to do about them are also performed by different people. And many of the thinkers are not the decision makers. They're often at least another step away.#1084•
And of course, those who decide on a course of action aren't usually the ones who will do the work of executing on the action plan.#1017•
An ounce of information is worth a pound of data.
An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information.
An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge.
And an ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of understanding.#976•
As writer, consultant, and teacher Clay Shirky says, "Abundance breaks more things than scarcity." With data, information, and knowledge being abundant, the advantage that people, companies, and societies enjoyed because they possessed proprietary knowledge assets is now diminished or completely gone, and what remains both scarce and coveted is understanding, wisdom, and speed of execution#1093•
The flaw, though, is believing that the best way to benefit from these attributes is to opt in to an interview-based, hub-and-spoke model: The answers are "out there" and all we have to do is to hire a partner to bring them to us.
That model is not suited to complexity.
•It taps into the important contributions of requisite variety through a linear sequence of interviews (linear, even if scheduling of interviews allows for some to happen in parallel). This isn't fast enough, and it doesn't build connections among the people who collectively hold the answers.#991•
The right way to benefit from outside experts is to combine them within the requisite variety group. The right way to find answers is through conversations, not interviews. The right way to prepare people for execution is to engage them in co-creating their way forward, not to have someone else tell them what they have to do.#975•
Chapter 3
The Complexity Formula: Solving for Complexity in 10 Simple Steps
1.Acknowledge the complexity.
2.Construct a really, really good question.
3.Target a requisite variety of solvers.
4.Localize the solvers.
5.Eliminate the noise.
6.Agree on the right agenda.
7.Put people on a collision course.
8.Advance iteratively and emergently.
9.Change how people interact.
10.Translate clarity and insights into action.#1020•
Chapter 4
RECOGNIZING THAT YOU'RE NOT IN CONTROL of your complex challenge provides the foundation for moving forward#1008•
Would two "experts" bring about the same result?
No
Yes
Talent strategy#1045•
Chapter 5
With a complex challenge, however, while you could think of a straightforward label (like "Double the business," "Outpace the market," or "Take the brand to the next level"), this drives deeper questions about the challenge itself, which results in a better expression of the challenge, not a solution. That's exactly what you need to get going: a better expression of the challenge.#1000•
Use questions about the complicated to solve the challenge. Use questions about the complex to define the challenge.#965•
When it comes to jumping into complexity, do that from any part of the deck because it's all one pool#1001•
Are they uncomfortable with it because it challenges the status quo, sets the bar high, or suggests a lot of work needs to be done#964•
In general, notice that if there's any bias baked into these questions it's around time frame, objectives and, in a few cases, decisions already made that are offered as "givens."#1056•
Stretch goals force people to think beyond the same-old-same-old solutions and encourage bigger and bolder ideas#1012•
Chapter 6
Personality, thinking style, strength on a team;
•Basic demographics;
•Attitudinal factors;
•Stake in the challenge;
•Other hats they wear;
•Influence and authority as they relate to the challenge.#1095•
Chapter 7
Participants who talked face-to-face experienced synchronized brain activity in the same area of their brains, which researchers believe resulted from the communication of "multimodal sensory information" (e.g., facial expressions, gestures) as well as more continuous turn-taking behaviors.
These results are significant in light of Google's massive, internal study of what distinguishes high-performing teams from low-performing ones: Not team cohesion, motivation, or average IQ, but rather frequent turn-taking in conversations and high social sensitivity toward what team members are thinking and feeling#1098•
Chapter 8
The noise we're talking about in this chapter takes all forms—too much information all at once; too much wrong or inaccurate information; and too much missing, ambiguous, unreliable, or fragmented information.#1075•
We are making our way toward clarity and action in the face of complexity#1010•
Chapter 9
If you look hard enough, you can find "simplicity on the other side of complexity," as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said#1073•
Chapter 10
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist, said: "Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways, it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky—to think of serendipitous as smart."#1041•
removing baking soda from a recipe has a much larger impact on the recipe than merely the absence of a single ingredient because of the chemical reactions that don't happen in its absence#1087•
Chapter 11
SEBASTIAN THRUN, a Stanford artificial intelligence professor and cofounder of Udacity, said: "Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation."#1070•
Chapter 14
Great questions and high-variety groups make meetings better in general. The critic role creates healthy tension and forces behavior change when people are talking together about anything substantive. Iteration gives people time to let go and to put pieces together.#1026•