Shipulski On Design

In school the problems you were given weren’t really problems at all. In school you opened the book to a specific page and there, right before you in paragraph form and numbered consecutively, was a neat row of “problems”. They were fully-defined, with known inputs, a formal equation that defined the system’s response, and one right answer. Nothing extra, nothing missing, nothing contradictory. Today’s problems are nothing like that.

Today’s problems don’t have a closed form solution; today’s problems don’t have a right answer. Three important factors come into play: companies and their systems are complex; the work, at some level, is always new; and people are always part of the equation.

It’s not that companies have a lot of moving parts (that makes them complicated); it’s that the parts can respond differently in different situations, can change over time (learn), and the parts can interact and change each others’ response (that’s complex). When you’re doing work you did last time, there’s a pretty good chance the system will perform like it did last time. But it’s a different story when the inputs are different, when the work is new.

When the work is new, there’s no precedent. The inputs are new and the response is newer. Perturb the system in a new way and you’re not sure how it will respond. New interactions between preciously unreactive parts make for exciting times. The seemingly unconnected parts ping each other through the ether, stiffen or slacken, and do their thing in a whole new way. Repeatability is out the window, and causal predictability is out of the question. New inputs (new work) slathers on layers of unknownness that must be handled differently.

Now for the real complexity culprit – people. Companies are nothing more than people systems in the shape of a company. And the work, well, that’s done by people. And people are well known to be complex. In a bad mood, we respond one way; confident and secure we respond in another. And people have memory. If something bad happened last time, next time we respond differently. And interactions among people are super complex – group think, seniority, trust, and social media.

Our problems swim with us in a hierarchical sea of complexity. That’s just how it is. Keep that in mind next time you put together your Gantt chart and next time you’re asked to guarantee the outcome of an innovation project.

Complexity is real, and there are real ways to handle it. But that’s for another time. Until then, I suggest you bone up on Dave Snowden’s work. When it comes to complexity, he’s the real deal.

Image credit – miguelb.