Managing complexity is a challenge!
The pace of life continues to increase creating something called complexity growth. Greater amounts of information can overwhelm us with detail and information overload. Greater speed of information causes more reactive behavior responses increasing our stress. Greater connectivity to larger and wider networks creates information overload coming from more places.
Complexity can be defined around two things:
- The number of parts involved.
- How those parts interact with each other.
Several things are valuable to understand about complexity and how it impacts organizations and teams.
First, complexity grows exponentially. For example, when a team grows from 5 people to 10 people the complexity does not just double. With 5 people, normally all 5 interact with the other 4 creating 20 communication links. With 10 people, normally all 10 still interact with the other 9 creating 90 total communication links. In this example, the number of people doubled. The number of communications links grew 450%!
Second, organizations and teams hit ceilings of complexity. Communication seems to get worse. Execution becomes less reliable and more difficult. We experience “Greater Effort and Less Results!”
Third, teams get past ceilings of complexity by thinking differently and by realigning systems, processes and structures. Systems are things like meeting cadence, operating schedules, and thinking about what do I do that affects others in the system, etc. Processes are how things are done; the steps, sequence, timing, etc. Structures are things like org charts, team configurations, reporting structures, roles & responsibilities, etc.
Change can be hard!
In Part 2 of this blog, we’ll look at how individuals get past ceilings of complexity and what you can do to organize and manage yourself and your teams to deal with greater complexity.
Onward and Upward,
Steve
