Yesterday’s post laid out several reasons benefits of understanding your organisation as a machine.* But many of the important parts of your organisation don’t behave in predictable or mechanistic ways. Your team’s culture, for example, is a affected by, for example:
- organisational history;
- personalities on the team;
- individual moods;
- collective morale;
- Team members’ stage of life and health;
- interpersonal chemistry or rivalry;
- changes in team members’ salaries or position;
- ‘near’ factors like the closure of a favourite neighbourhood gathering spot;
- the health of the wider economy;
- government policy;
- levels of outside interest and flows of money into or out of your sector
In short, your organisation is a complex adaptive system within the complex adaptive system of the economy and the world as a whole.
Unlike complicated problems, complex problems cannot be solved, only managed. They cannot be controlled, only nudged. This is the domain of the butterfly effect, where a small change can lead to something big, and a big change can barely make a dent.
Aaron Dignan
Fruitful thinking
What this means is that trying to eliminate uncertainty or narrowly control outcomes is likely to be futile. Instead you need to ask which nudges will make your system more likely to produce good outcomes. You can think of projects and things you do as seeds with a chance of bearing fruit, and so widely – and position yourself to take advantage of opportunities that crop up in surprising places but seem to strengthen the system.
And as you think about the wider ecosystem and realise that you’re scarily dependent on ‘exogenous’ factors way beyond your control, you can think about how to nurture and protect the flows that you depend on, like flows of information or resources (including people and ideas) into and out of your organisation. How might building a network (for example) strengthen these flows, or tweak the system’s disposition in a way that’s in your favour?
*If you go deeper there are compelling arguments that even our machines are part of a living ecology – see Kevin Kelly‘s What Technology Wants and The Techium for jumping off point into this way of thinking