It's not that simple.

Take a look at the photo.  It's better than a thousand words.  What do you see?  A moving tunnel of water, beautifully formed but given all the constituents of that combine to produce that simplistic beauty - wind, water, tidal forces, etc - could anyone have predicted what it would be, where it would happen and when?  No!

It's not that simple.

We grapple with complexity every day of our lives, knowingly and unknowingly.  But out of complexity sometimes there are emergent properties, like waves, which in general form are predictable.  There will always be waves.  However, the specifics - what, where and when - are almost impossible to predict.  Complexity occurs whenever there is a plethora of interdependent relationships.  That situation exists, of course, in any organisation.  Directors of organisations will experience, as I have done, the myth of management control.  You can have strategies, policies, procedures, work breakdown structures, etc, but you still don't have absolute control.

It's not that simple.

Any organisation, regardless of size, is a highly complex system.  It has a multitude of relationships and interdependencies.  These are within the organisation - person to person, person to technology, technology to technology.  There are relationships between the organisation and the external environment - company to customers, company to suppliers, customers to suppliers.  The company also sits in a Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) environment.  So how can directors and managers control factors that affect their businesses but over which they have no influence, let alone control?  Maybe their fancy strategic plans, scenario planning, risk analyses and the latest management fads, provide them with the tools they need to inject certainty into an uncertain environment.  I don't think so.

It's not that simple.

But can't organisations be so nimble and agile that, even if they are not in control of factors that affect their businesses, they can react swiftly to changes in events in order to out-perform their competitors? Yes and no, we are now getting into the thorny issue of culture - "that's the way we do things around here."  I strongly believe that a company's culture is an emergent behaviour of a highly complex organisation.  Directors and managers come and go, introduce new change programmes, but the culture usually survives any 'interference'.  It's impossible to calm the oceans!

It's not that simple.

What does all this mean?  Is it worth getting out of bed each morning if we can't really change anything?  Of course it is, but we do have to have a sense of realism of what we understand versus what we don't understand and what we can influence or control versus what we can't influence or control.  I've banged on in previous posts about systems thinking, recognising that the whole is not just the sum of the parts and only when we achieve that level of thinking can we begin to understand and maybe anticipate the outcomes of complex living.  Is that really the panacea?  No........

It's not that simple!!