Leaders and Complexity: How to Organize the Undoable

The best leaders do not say: I can explain this. They say: this we must feel together.

I saw a leader once in an impossible situation. Budget that was gone. Team that had vanished. Customers who were angry. The first impulse would be: explain that this is not your fault. Explain what you are doing. Control the narrative.

That is not what this leader did. He said to everyone: this is worse than I can say. This is going really wrong. We will not solve this by explaining better. We will solve this by going slower together, and staying close.

That is leadership in complexity.

Complexity is not the same as difficulty. Difficulty you can solve with more time or more people or more money. Complexity you cannot solve. You can only live with it.

A difficult problem is: how do we build a fast website? Given enough engineers, given enough time, that is solved. That is difficult. That is not complexity.

A complex problem is: how do we keep an organization together while the system it grows in is slowly falling apart? That question has no solution. That question requires constant adaptation, constant listening, constant doing differently. There is no end state. There is only continuance.

The mistake many leaders make is treating complexity as difficulty. They say: okay, this is very complicated, so we need more planning. So we set up a project office. So we make long-term scenarios. They add structure. What they are doing is adding structure to something that must remain unstructured.

The leaders who work in complexity without breaking, they do something else. They do not ask: how do we control this? They ask: how do we create psychological safety so everyone dares to step in if something goes wrong? They do not ask: what is the plan? They ask: who are the people who feel this and can react?

This sounds like you are not a leader, more like you are letting go. The opposite is true. This is discipline. This is saying: I do not believe I can plan this. So I will feel it, together with you.

Another pattern I recognize: good leaders do one thing at a time in complexity. They do not say: here are ten things that must change. They say: this is what we do tomorrow. After that we see what it asks of us.

They also cut old things away while adding new ones. They do not say: plus the extra work. They say: if we do this, we no longer do that. This keeps the load bearable.

And they work in short sprints. Not because agile is fashionable. But because in complexity you must continually check: does this still fit? Does this still work? Or do we need to do something different?

What I see is that leadership in complexity goes against your natural inclination. You want solution. You want answer. But in complexity you say: I will not solve this. I will stand in it and move with it.

Sources: Dave Snowden, Cynefin Framework; Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization; observation of crisis leadership.