p.1 The impact of the "complexity" on management thinking is like
a smoldering fire. It's gradually remaking mental models. It's still small in terms of acreage impacted, but I'll
predict that it will eventually come to consume most of the terrain. It will call into question the soundness of traditional
approaches to management. Indeed, it will make managers wonder if their old way of doing things and the results they thought
they produced were just an illusion. Made more of luck than intent.
p.1 The more connected something is, the more complex it is.
Complex things often exist within a system. By system, I mean a network of interrelationships. A change in one connected
thing gives rise to changes in the various things to which it is connected. More connections mean more change.
p.1 Russell Ackoff, the renowned systems expert, once emphasized that success
with a true system demands the effective management of interactions, not the management of actions. Interaction is
what happens continuously at the various connections between things. It follows then that successful
management in a densely connected system involves managing effectively in an environment of complexity.
p.2 In a complex environment, the changes that one action will generate
are beyond prediction because of all the other interactions they set off.
p.2 Forests, indeed whole ecosystems within and around them, emerge
without help from any committee or executive team. They establish their own linkages, generate their
own equilibrium, and adjust to the change at the level of the individual organism as well as the level of systems and subsystems.
p.2 Complex conditions demand continuous adaptation. In a complex,
highly connected system, things happen fast. Maintaining a steady state of dynamic balance requires continuous adjustment
and accommodation. These shifts occur naturally as one change sets off another.
p.3 As you move far from certainty and far from agreement, you enter the
zone of complexity. Here, much different approaches are needed to succeed. Those approaches will recognize the principles
iterated above - in other words, making short predictions, enabling self-organization, using simple materials as building
blocks, being continuously flexible and adaptive, all while looking for lessons and metaphors in other complex systems, particularly
biological systems. Out there in the zone of complexity, things are different. Management that succeeds will be catalytic,
facilitative, enabling, adaptive, incremental, and patient.
