Complexity thinking is only of value in situations that are by nature complex.  This needs to be distinguished from complicated (or difficult).  Complex situations/problems/environments have certain characteristics which non-complex situations do not have.  It is important to be able to recognise when something is complex, and then to treat such situations appropriately.  That means two basic skills need to be acquired:

1. The ability to recognise when something is complex.
2. The ability to respond to a complex situation appropriately.

Failure to treat complex situations appropriately inevitably leads to potentially unproductive, wasteful, and also destructive decisions, while they seem to make perfect sense to the decision maker who fails to recognise the complex nature of what they are encountering.  In this way the ability to recognise complexity for what it is can put you ahead of others in extracting value from any given (complex) situation.  At the same time it is true that treating a situation as if it is complex when in fact it is not, can lead to wasteful use of resources. The exponential gain that can be obtained by responding to a complex situation appropriately is therefore offset by the fact that we can also be excessively wasteful if we treat a non-complex situation as complex.  So complexity thinking offers you multiplication of value, but also carries the risk of unacceptable wastefulness if empoyed in areas that are not complex in nature.

The fact that the risk of waste and loss exists cannot be used to avoid complexity at all, since all traditional ways that we know of to solve problems and think about situations do not yield value (and in fact often prove to be counter productive) when applied to complex problems.

Our courses on complexity thinking therefore aim for you to excel in both of the above-mentioned skills, because the value that can be unlocked by this approach is worth the effort to learn how to recognise complexity and how to respond appropriately. 

We plan to launch our complexity thinking courses in the second semester of 2008.  Subscribe for our newsletter to stay informed. 

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments

Show/Hide comment form