Every two years, IBM publishes findings based on a comprehensive survey of executives around the world. Four years ago he titled it Leading in Complexity.
This report reads: While eight out of ten CEOs foresee significant complexity in the future, less than half are prepared to manage it .
Complexity as a description of the "new environment" where we work, as a difficulty we must face, and so on. appears in more and more articles and books on management, most of the time at the beginning, warning of how much the world of work and business has changed. The term refers, among other things, to the fact that it is increasingly difficult to predict what our work will be like next month: if we will continue to work where we do it, how and with whom we do it, even if our company will continue to exist!
Indeed, unpredictability is one of the characteristics of the so-called complex systems of which we seem to be a part.
In fact, the growing uncertainty that seems new to us seems to be that it has been the norm throughout history. Although now we are rightly disturbed by the insecurity of the world of work, for a thousand years and until recently, in Europe, no one was sure of being alive three months from now. Says M. Livi-Baccithat until the middle of the 18th century death had a high random and unpredictable component. Various causes, such as the great plague epidemics, took the lives of people of all ages and conditions.
In my case, a literary text that serves to doubt the normality of the calm certainty of our time, is the first chapter of the book Un Mundo de Ayer by Stefan Zweig. The author describes how at the end of the 19th century, in Austria, millions of people shared the certainty that civilization had reached its historical maximum. Nothing and nobody could alter the well-being achieved, it was only possible to continue progressing. The golden age of security. And then everything turned out to be a house of cards.
There is a current of thought that suggests that humans form complex systems. So complex that economists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists are still unable to predict our behavior, except in a few situations. Organizations, as made up of people, are complex systems whose behavior is equally difficult to predict. This current suggests not defending against the complexity and associated uncertainty but accepting and managing it.
Beyond noting that the world has changed in this direction, what is the advantage of considering our work environment as a complex system?
From my point of view, the complexity perspective is more in line with my own experience and observation. The basic idea that this perspective proposes is that the elements that make up an organization, people, are unique agents, different from each other, each with a different and changing history, training and information at all times. Each of the agents influences the others and is influenced by the rest. As if that were not enough, this situation is being updated, constantly changing, and new results, information, agreements, conceptions and ways of cooperating emerge in an unpredictable and unexpected way in each interaction.
This description, I repeat, is more in line with reality than another, more widespread, according to which organizations are entities where the results are always predictable if the agent presses the appropriate key.
This second most widespread way of understanding the world, our way of acting and relating, is one of simple causal relationships. The events we perceive have a cause and the link with the effects they produce is so direct and simple that we can easily imagine their relationship.
For example, if I need my department to generate new ideas to solve a certain situation, the “simple” perspective will assume that by having a meeting about it (cause) I will get the new idea needed (effect). From a “complex” perspective, the result of a meeting like that is unpredictable (we cannot ensure that the idea produced is good enough) and instead it proposes to stimulate spaces for interaction between people where valuable ideas are unexpectedly produced (as in fact usually happens) and that the channeling of this valuable information is planned for its use for the benefit of the organization (as in fact it does not usually happen). From this perspective, the place where valuable information can emerge is impossible to foresee, it could be in a meeting, in a corridor, in front of the coffee machine,in a conversation in a chat, etc. Managers, this perspective suggests, must provide and take care of environmental conditions that facilitate interactions between agents that provoke the birth of novelties.
Despite the apparent consensus that the world has become complicated and its complexity has become more evident, and despite the fact that we notice some of its unpleasant effects, our way of understanding that same world and acting in it seems to have not changed.
In my opinion, we maintain a tenacious way of seeing only under the prism of causal simplicity. This, in addition to other origins, feeds, it seems to me, from our daily experience. Everywhere and continuously, during a normal day, explicit and simple causal relationships manifest themselves: I flip the switch and the light in the room goes on. The traffic light turns green, I start the car. If I follow the learned procedure, when I press a key the bank teller will give me the money I need. If my boss does not act as I expect, it is because he has a habit of me or does not know how to direct, etc..
So the world constantly tells us that things are indeed related in a simple and direct way.
This continuous impression that penetrates us without realizing it is also constantly underlined by the media with scientific news that highlights this type of causal relationship. These messages have a great indoctrinating force as their scientific character legitimizes them in the eyes and ears of the large lay population. Perhaps it is precisely because of their simplicity that the ideas exhibited by this relationship, the only ones capable of being understood by the general public, are chosen by the editors of the newspapers and magazines with the largest circulation.
For example, it is possible to listen and read periodically the reductionist proposition that all human behavior is explained, or will come to be explained, by deciphering a certain genetic sequence. It's all in the genes. I do not suggest that these scientific propositions are wrong, what I want to emphasize is that they seem the only ones that are disseminated by the media.
Something similar occurs with the huge number of articles written under that prism of simple causality and that are easily identified through a certain form of headline: The 5 keys to increasing your emotional intelligence 7.
A variant of the above, which combines science and popularization, takes the form of turning a scientific idea into something false but ready-to-wear for the general public that, simplified, mythologizes and extends it.
Surely you have heard something about the different ways of learning and expressing ourselves that people have, depending on whether we are predominantly left or right brain activity. In the "left" the logical, analytical thinking predominates. The "rights" have a facility to see things as a whole, artistic minds. Well, it's a lie 8. Again we buy more easily the wrong idea of a simple relationship between a delimited anatomical part and specific effects than the complex one and, it seems more correct, that “the function is not tied to an area, it is the product of a network cell distributed throughout the brain through lobes and hemispheres 9 ”.
To this must be added the experiences at work. A characteristic of life in organizations is the omnipresence of data: daily sales; monthly expenses; shipping errors; objectives achieved; level of competence achieved; etc. There are indicators for almost everything 10. Most of these measurements and data have a simple causal relationship to the events they report. As I have said before, I do not want to suggest that indicators and data are not essential to manage the company, I just want to draw attention to their possible contribution to the subjective construction of our image of how the world works.
Finally, I can assume that in organizations dedicated to producing science based on the experimental scientific method, the essential need to isolate and study the relationship between a few variables can imbue those who work in it with a way of seeing things where this type predominates. causal relationship.
What consequences can all of the above have?
- On September 16, 2014 it took me 8 min. 26 sg to find on the Internet and collect from eight different websites the following article titles:
It is not only a way of using the title as a resource to attract attention and induce reading, in all these cases, and most articles of this type that I continue reading, presuppose a type of direct and simple causal relationship between what is intended to be achieved and the recommended action. That authors believe what they write is another matter, here I want to highlight the constant bombardment of the simple causality model to which we are subjected.
- Mendez R. (August 16, 2013). Dismantling the myth of “left-brain”, “right-brain”. Recovered from:
www.medciencia.com/desmontando–el–mito–de–cerebro–izquierdo–cerebro–derecho/
On “neuromyths” taken as truth with practical consequences in education, you can read: Howard-Jones Paul A.
Here I am going to stop because now is when, closing the article, I should offer a solution, following Mencken, attractive and useless. I don't think it exists. In the world there are simple and complex relationships, they are not good or bad, they are what there are. What I am convinced of is that the eventual usefulness of this article, beyond entertaining, lies in the idea that the more aware we are of the invisible dimensions that may be influencing our way of thinking and acting, the more control we will have on our actions and more successful will be our decisions.
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IBM (2010). Lead in Complexity. Retrieved from:
This expression may be using the term complex as a synonym for complicated. In this article we do not consider them synonymous. To see the difference, see: Goldstein J., Hazy JK, Lichtenstein BB (2010). Complexity and the nexus of leadership. Ed. Palgrave. Macmillan.
Livi-Bacci M. (1990). Minimal history of world population. Barcelona: Ariel, SA
Zweig Stefan (2001). The world of yesterday: memories of a European. Ed. Cliff
This last example is of a different category than the preceding ones, here the relationship may be subjective, I have included it because even imagined, that causal relationship is often experienced as if it were entirely objective.
Without reaching sports, science is one of the most constant among the ten or twelve categories shown on the front page of many of the most popular generalist newspapers on the internet. See, for example, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, The New York Times, The Independent, Daily Mail, El Mundo, Le Monde, El Confidencial, El País, Corriere della Sera. (Information checked on November 28, 2014)
To really solve it, not to momentarily eliminate its effects so that the problem has apparently disappeared when in reality it waits hidden under a carpet for the opportunity to manifest itself again.
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