WTF is complexity leadership?
WTF is complexity leadership?
Path Notes #5
I think the next century will be the century of complexity.
Stephen Hawking, January 2000
It sounds great doesn’t it?
The perennial allure of leadership with this mysterious, century-defining term bolted onto it.
Ask your friendly AI bot for a definition and you’ll get something like this:
Complexity leadership is an approach to leadership that focuses on enabling adaptive, emergent solutions within dynamic and interconnected systems by fostering collaboration, innovation, and flexibility in response to complex challenges.
Yikes!
But sit with that for a while – roll it around the tongue - and you realize it’s a reasonable description of virtually anything that has ever uplifted the human condition. It’s the underlying thing that the best of our philanthropists, our politicians and our prophets do.
Enabling adaptive emergence in the face of complex challenges.
Complexity leadership.
Dig around and you’ll find a whole complexity leadership literature. Parts of it are amazing. Mary Uhl-Bien has done as much as anyone to breathe life into the term and offers a pragmatic entry point.
And parts of it feels like somebody put all the complexity and organizational dynamics terminology into a random definition generator that spins flashy word webs to catch and fleece the bewildered.
I’d like to zoom out for minute. To think out loud and take a look at this whole thing from up on the balcony.
Leadership? It’s simply social influence.
Complexity? That which arises from the relationships between agents within a ‘system’.
Complexity leadership? Learning about and intentionally influencing those relationships in order to generate new systems properties and outcomes.
The term seems to get used much less than systems leadership. And as always, people often mean completely different things when they do use it!
I’m noticing at least four distinct leadership phenomena sheltering under its branches:
Unconscious network-agency:
We could call this uninformed complexity leadership. It’s what the wolves were doing during the rewilding of Yellowstone Park. They did a few, very simple, wolf things. They hunted elk. They chased off the coyotes and made life harder for the mountain lions. They reproduced. And when their family pack got to a certain size, they split off and created new ones. Taken together, those local actions and ‘protocols’ had a range of first, second and third order effects that fundamentally altered the relational dynamics within an ecosystem. But from the perspective of the wolves, those impacts were unintentional and unconscious; they certainly weren’t referencing the meta-pattern to modulate their local hunting strategies.
We’re all doing this kind of complexity leadership, all the time!
Every one of us is an agent in a complex living system. We exert our agency and influence all the time in contexts that we don’t realize are complex or in ways that have complex consequences that are largely invisible to us.
Our every thought, word and action influences the system.
Our presence. Who we connect with. Where we draw boundaries. Everything that we do or don’t do. Most of our leadership – our social influence - is unconscious and it results in unanticipated and unnoticed emergent outcomes. Sometimes those outcomes amplify our conscious leadership strategies. And all too often, they undermine them. It’s why social movements with noble intentions all too often end up amplifying the very suffering they set out to alleviate. And paradoxically, it’s why historically some truly evil bastards have ended up catalyzing unintentionally beneficial outcomes.
We don’t become complexity leaders; we already are complexity leaders!
But for the most part, we don’t realize it. What we become is more conscious. It’s why practices and relationships that help us become less subject to our biases and cultivate self-awareness or reflexive capability are so important for anyone seeking to influence systems.
Complexity-flavoured leadership:
Partially-informed complexity leadership. Here we see approaches that use complexity concepts in a largely metaphoric way to shape their social and organizational analyses and interventions. This would include ‘cutting-edge’ (aka ‘faddish’) leadership and management trends that have cherry-picked the popular complexity leadership literature along with social movements that aspire to system-level impact and use the language of complexity but use largely conventional leadership strategies.
Complexity cosplay!
Dressing up old paradigms, order responses and linear approaches in the sexy new language of complexity. I’ve previously described some of these as systems-adjacent approaches.
It might be unfair to say it. But the decisions and actions of virtually all of us - academics, activists, voters, politicians, public servants, leaders, businesspeople, investors and change agents alike - are all too often shaped by a kind of violent but unconscious reductionism.
And it’s no less violent just because we wrap it in the language of systems and complexity.
Complexity-responsive leadership:
Here we see institutions (organizations, governments etc.) that have traditionally operated as conventional hierarchies shift their approach and structure in response to adaptive challenges and complex contexts.
New levels of external complexity have forced them to either evolve or perish.
There are many examples. Conventional military forces adapting to the challenges posed by distributed networks and asymmetric warfare. Health agencies responding to cascading socio-economic or transnational crises. Public service reform. Governments adapting to the challenges of fintech and infotech. Media conglomerates desperately acquiring, selling off, merging, copying and restructuring in the face of constantly shifting communications technologies. It’s all basically the same thing; traditional hierarchies adapting to the realities of networked complexity to maintain their resilience, relevance, market share, influence or control. In crude power terms we could say complexity-responsive leadership involves the use of complexity leadership strategies to maintain hegemony.
To make enough changes to keep things the way they are.
It’s Ashby’s famous Law of Requisite Variety in action.
Ross Ashby was a British psychiatrist, polymath and one of the early contributors to the field of cybernetics. He used variety as a measure of information; we could think of it as the range of possible systems states or the potential options available to someone trying to play a game or control a disturbance. Mathematically, the only way you can win the game or control your opponent is by having more options for responding than they have options for acting.
Or as Ashby bluntly put it, “Only variety can destroy variety.”
Ashby expanded this to propose that “when the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial) the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system.” For a system to survive and remain stable, it must match the complexity, diversity and variety of its environment. If the system is not capable of doing so, it will ultimately fail and perish. It’s a proposition that systems from dodo bird flocks to long-established industries to nation states have discovered the hard way.
You have to meet complexity with complexity.
A cynic might say that, in an era of exponential VUCA and organizational failure, Ashby’s Law is a licence for organizational theorists and management consultants to print money. There’s a law of the universe that you either haven’t heard of or don’t fully understand that not only explains why your business is underperforming but is practically a cosmic endorsement of complexity-flavoured management consultancies and agile strategies! For the truth is, almost every one of our institutions evolved in simpler times and must evolve to survive.
The social instability generated by their inability to do so becomes its own kind of amplifying feedback loop. An instability that is cynically exploited by polarizing populists all over the world.
All too often, institutions either try to meet growing complexity with expensive, overly elaborate change processes, or end up on the back foot, constantly reacting to the fires ignited by their own maladaptive clumsiness.
We end up oscillating between the too complicated and the too simplistic.
And here lies the paradox for complexity-responsive leaders trying to apply Ashby’s Law and influence social systems. It holds most true when the systems agents are operating within the same paradigm and rule set.
In a chess match or jiu-jitsu contest, the player with the greatest ‘variety’ will win.
But if one player unilaterally changes the rules or the paradigm (i.e. what ‘winning’ means to them), they are no longer playing the same game and the Law no longer holds true in the same way. For those interested in conscious systems transformation, Ashby’s Law offers explanatory guidance but also a kind of conceptual trap.
Whose game are you playing?
Conscious network-agency:
In many ways conscious network-agency is similar to complexity-responsive leadership. Both involve the use of leadership and behavioral strategies by network agents (individual and/or collective) that leverage complexity principles in ways that lead to new systems properties and outcomes.
The essential difference is the state of consciousness such strategies are in service to.
At its best conscious network-agency is co-evolutionary. You become a participant in the unfolding of creation. Working with nature. The original manual for this kind of leadership is the Tao Te Ching and those interested in complexity will find value in its 81 brief chapters.
If you want to be a great leader
You must learn to follow the Tao
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
And the world will govern itself[1].
Conscious network agency is one answer to the question “what would leadership look like in practice if we fully embraced a complexity perspective?” It embodies the intentionality and skillfulness that we see in complexity-responsive leadership. But it is grounded in a state of being – a complexity consciousness – that is characterized by awareness, relationality and reciprocity. A felt-sense of reverence for and connection to the living fabric of the world along with a deep-time sense of responsibility to future generations.
The kind of participatory consciousness that doesn’t take itself too seriously while simultaneously understanding and embracing its role as a caretaker species.
Co-evolutionary participation in the unfolding of creation might sound impossibly mystical or impractical. I can’t pick up the kids/clean the kitchen/unplug the toilet/balance the budget right now – I’m participating in the unfolding of creation! But – like all patterns of complex emergence – it arises from very simple, very practical local interactions. Scholar-activist Vandana Shiva describes it beautifully:
When I talk about the infinite creative energy of the universe, I am talking about Gaia’s self-organising energy, the creative human energy to work and to produce, to organise, and to transform. In India and around the world, this human energy has helped cultivate the self-organising energy (whether a culture calls it shakti or wildness) of the world…If we are going to redefine wildness, we have to simultaneously redefine humans as co-creators of wealth with Nature. We both rely on and co-create wildness when our living energies work with those of the earth.
We work with the wildness of the world. The Shakti. The Tao. The Force. The ‘infinite creative energy’. Life’s self-organizing capacity.
This kind of complexity leadership – conscious network-agency - is simply our sentient participation as tiny but unique nodes in the networked fabric of life.
Let me pivot for a moment to Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk.
I love this book and have made it the required reading for several graduate systems and complexity courses.
MBA students often find it a challenge – not just because of what it says but how it says it. They don’t just read it – they end up having an experience because Tyson challenges – veritably messes with – the linear mind!
If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour and get a copy. It’s one of the most beautifully cogent things ever written about the intersection of Indigenous thought, complexity, sustainability and education. It’s wise, deeply moving and laugh out loud funny.
Tyson describes those engaged in what I’m calling conscious network-agency as ‘sustainability agents’. Such agents, he suggests, “have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like: diversify, connect, interact, and adapt.”
Diversification is about fully embodying your own uniqueness while seeking out and interacting with dissimilar others and systems beyond your own.
Connectedness is about linking up with multiple other agents It begins with simple dyads and expands to encompass not only whole networks but networks of networks – both within and beyond your own system.
Interaction is about the continuous exchange of information, knowledge, energy and resources with as many other agents as possible rather than trying to store it individually.
Adaptation. Here’s where it gets harder. Such agents allow themselves to be transformed through their interactions with other agents and enable knowledge and energy to flow freely through the systems they inhabit. According to Tyson, if you are truly adaptive and contextually versatile, you are open to sudden eruptions of energy and may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor thereby facilitating chain reactions of creative events across an entire system.
And if you keep doing these things, “little systems of vibrant complexity will spring up around you and other strange attractors will draw you into their amazing webs.”
And that’s how we become co-creators. Not by conceiving and then launching our grand design upon the world. By participating freely, humbly and deliberately in living networks of relationships.
The way a tongue cell participates in the crafting and singing of a new song.
At one level, a complexity lens offers some kind of rational or cognitive antidote to the partial perspectives that flow from severed collective consciousness. An illusion that causes us to we perceive, think and act as if things are not in relationship and we weren’t actually connected to them!
Cast-out-of-the-garden-of-Eden fearful consciousness.
And let’s be sober about this. Complexity skills and capabilities can easily be mobilized in service of severed consciousness. Its why fabulously wealthy investment funds have snapped up most of the brightest mathematicians who understand non-linear math and stochastic analysis. It’s hard to let go of the habits of mind, unconscious beliefs/biases/frameworks, along with the familiar patterns of action and relationship that are rooted in linearity and control.
There’s a critical threshold that is very hard for us to cross – the relinquishment of the control mindset. It’s more of a developmental challenge rather than a knowledge/policy challenge. A genuine complexity perspective can seldom be ‘downloaded’ onto an existing cognitive platform; it’s more like an operating system upgrade. And when you utilize complexity tools and frameworks on the old operating systems of modernity, there are some real risks.
Self-delusion is one of them.
This is as true for me as it is for anyone else. But it seems to be particularly true for some of the most brilliant folks I’ve encountered in the tech and finance sectors. Their skill in modelling, analyzing and manipulating the dynamics of complex fields has put unimaginable power, wealth and influence in the hands of some super smart but not necessarily deeply developed humans.
And when great power is harnessed to the burning ambition of an unripened ego it seldom goes well for the rest of us.
Take the work of Dominic Cummings – the puppet-master for the Brexit campaign and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisor. He’s a complexity geek who gets the math. He certainly comprehends the application of complexity leadership principles to social policy and the evolution of public institutions. But - in my biased and temporally-bounded opinion – he ended up doing more harm than good. See his complexity-related policy musings here. A brilliant guy but a fucking disaster when harnessed to the regressive political ambitions of a bunch of self-interested nationalist goons.
More Saruman than Gandalf.
Skillful complexity leadership that is not rooted in complexity consciousness – humility, self-awareness, reverence and relationality - is a dangerous thing.
But put those two things together – skillful intention in service of an awakened and deeply relational consciousness or sentience – and wild magic begins to flow in ways that uplift us all.
And all of our relations.
Chances are, you are probably doing all four of these complexity leadership dances right now!
We cannot help but exert unconscious network-agency.
Virtually all of us have dressed up our preferred responses and linear reactivity in some form of sweet-smelling complexity-flavoured language!
Most of us are engaged one way or another in complexity-responsive initiatives – helping the dominant institutions of modernity adapt and evolve to the shifting sands of the moment.
And a few are working to cultivate their conscious network-agency in service of radically co-evolutionary outcomes.
If you’re reading this, the chances are pretty high that you’re one of them!
And for that, I am deeply grateful.
[1] This is the start of verse 57 from Stephen Mitchell’s 2006 rendering of the Tao Te Ching