Emergence

Our increasingly connected and fast paced world creates more and bigger challenges that are resistant to traditional problem-solving approaches. These problems are often called complex, wicked, or hard and require a deeper understanding and new approaches. Transformation and change programs often don't deliver on their promises and leave organisations and employees with increasing change fatigue and disillusionment.

Disruptive events in the environment (CoViD pandemic, supply chain challenges, change in consumer preferences, increased pace of technological innovation) require a faster and, more importantly, a more agile reaction. Long running, centrally controlled change programs find themselves with a reality that has moved on while requirements for a go-live in 5 years are still being documented. The program falls behind before it even got started properly.

Accepting the inherent complexity of social systems and the resulting futility of the illusion of control are the first steps to change our approach to change and transformation. While an organisational strategy and direction is important to keep efforts largely aligned, the actually implementation of change needs to be federated throughout the organisation and then brought together along the organisational hierarchy.

Consequently, large change programs don't require an architect to come up with a grand plan and then a hierarchical team to execute along that set out plan. but more of a gardening approach to lay out the high level structure and then tend to the individual parts of the garden, ensuring these develop in harmony.

What are complex problems?

Difficult problems typically have many stakeholders and interactions between them. They are often non-linear on how they react to intervention, and they are resistant to many established and frequently used management approaches. These problems are often characterised by:

• Lack of agreement on what the problem definition is (scope, stakeholders, understanding of current state, domains, etc.)
• Lack of agreement on a solution approach due to different priorities, trade-offs, stakeholders, or externalities
• Lack of agreement on experts or authorities due to unclear problem and solution definitions
• Lack of predictability and difficulty to grasp the whole problem, especially over time

A common characteristic is the involvement of humans and the difficulty to understand and predict their interactions. Whereby, in the early 20th century, rationalist management approaches tried to remove as much as possible of human variability and constraints, today, these need to be our starting point. Solutions to hard problems will be developed, implemented, and sustained by hundreds or thousands of employees, customers, suppliers, and affect potentially tens of thousands of other stakeholders. Hence, we need to take into account how humans behave, make decisions, or are motivated.

Think about how many of the questions you try to solve today are hard: a business transformation, culture change, the implementation of a new technology, changing a business process. Consider supply chain networks, customer relationship management, and the impact of any change on your employees. All while ensuring compliance with laws, data privacy and security, IT guidelines and financial reporting.

Most problem worth solving in today's world are hard problems that play out in a complex environment.

How we can support you

We believe that a deep understanding of the problem to be solved, the environment, and the organisation (people, process, technology) are essential for any kind of intervention to succeed. Besides out technical capabilities, we are focussing on the initial and ongoing sense-making process, generating ideas, stress testing assumptions and validating objectives and approaches. In our experience, project failure often has it's root cause in the early days, when objectives aren't internally consistent, trade-offs not made explicit or targets not being realistic.