Simplicity in the Age of Complexity

“The answer is simple,” the professor said, then he waited a minute and added the important qualifier, “if you are a mathematical genius.”

He was attempting to explain one of the most complex concepts of the semester. I remember laughing along with the class as we struggled to make sense of it at all.

In business, I often wonder if there are any simple problems. We are living in a world that is complex, full of ambiguity and more difficult to navigate.

That’s why I was interested to see how David Komlos and David Benjamin tackled the subject. Their new book is Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast. David Komlos is CEO of Syntegrity and David Bejamin leads Syntegrity’s client delivery organization.

Solving Complex Problems

What defines a complex problem?

Complex problems are messy, unstable, unpredictable, confounding and don’t come with right answers, only best attempts. These problems require new solutions created specifically for the circumstances, and you can only know that you’ve found a good one in retrospect. Contrast that with complicated challenges which are the domain of the expert: a known solution exists, and it can be reliably and successfully applied as needed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

Building a fence between your yard and a neighbor’s yard is a complicated challenge; building a great relationship with your neighbor is complex. Fixing a car is complicated; disrupting the automotive industry is complex. Implementing a customer relationship management system is complicated; delivering a winning customer experience every time is complex.

10 Steps to Solving Complexity

You list 10 simple steps to solving complexity. Which step trips leaders up more than others?

Leaders tend to get tripped up on the early steps, and when that happens it means they don’t even get to the point where they’re trying to implement the later ones.

In step 1 – acknowledge the complexity – leaders often don’t see the difference between complicated and complex, so they can’t acknowledge it. All they know is that some challenges tend to get solved, and some don’t. This leads to the wrong conclusion – if going to the experts to solve some problems (i.e. the complicated ones) works, it makes sense to go to them to solve all of them. Since the complex ones are categorically different, the experts and the expert-centric model of solving problems is the wrong approach.

Even when leaders do recognize and acknowledge that this problem is different, steps 2 and 3 are where they’ll tend to devote much less attention than they should, and these steps are also foundational. Step 2 is about framing the complexity in a great question, and step 3 is about getting all the right people involved in answering that question.

Instead of a great, clear, compelling, aspirational question – which takes work – they’ll tend to do some problem definition, have a report written, and use this as a starting point. This easily leads to miscommunication, misunderstanding and misalignment (from the start) about what the problem is, what success looks like, why it matters, and what’s at stake.

And instead of assigning a high-variety group from inside and around their organization to develop solutions, they’ll tend to go to the usual suspects, keep the group small, and rely on what they see, know and believe (which, with complex problems, isn’t nearly enough).

The Power of Questions

Let’s talk about questions. Talk about the power of a good question to crack complexity.

“A really, really good question will launch a thousand really, really good conversations” – nobody actually said that, but someone should have.Read the rest of this post...