Making Sense of Complex Adaptive Systems for Leaders
What do bee hives, cities, immune systems and companies have in common?
They are all examples of what scientists call Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and they are shaking traditional thinking to its foundations about how you lead and run companies.
Commenting on VISA International’s incredibly complex worldwide system of different currencies, customers, legal systems and the like, founder Dee Hock once admitted “It was beyond the power of reason to design an organisation to deal with such complexity.”
“The organisation had to be based on biological concepts to evolve, in effect to invent and organise itself.”
It is not as if the concept of a CAS is particularly new. It stem from chaos theory and ideas about adaptive and evolving systems that have been around in some form for a couple of decades.
What is changing though is growing awareness amongst leaders, organisational and development practitioners and trainers that CAS has something fundamental to teach about making things happen in organisations.
The essence of CAS is that from chaos and apparently random behaviour comes order and creativity, efficiency and results that no leader, no matter how clear-sighted or directive could ever hope to achieve.
We see complex adaptive systems around us everywhere, indeed we are one ourselves. Examples from real life include stock exchanges, rivers, eco systems, teams and entire companies.
They are more than the sum of their parts. Because the individual bits have freedom to act in unpredictable ways, and their actions are interconnected and influence each other, the final outcomes are also not totally predictable either.
This has stark implications for those in companies who see organisations as machine-like, in which being able to analyse and predict change outcomes accurately is a way of life.
In practice, CAS make such predictions almost useless. Leaders and managers must learn to accept far less stringent demands for accuracy of outcome.
For example, in one organisation a major change effort may start with a management retreat, meeting with employees and considerable publicity. Yet a few months later the proposed changes seem dead in the water.
In another organisation the chief executive makes a passing remark to someone about a problem which, through rumour and the grapevine indirectly leads to a industrial action that forever alters how the company operates.
What are the implications for managing change and leadership if you work in a CAS, which is what most organisations are?
