“Politics is a job that can really only be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for”
Otto von Bismarck
I’ve been sitting on some thoughts since January about the increased influence of complexity in the world around us and how strategy can help us make sense of it. With hindsight, they were all too timely!
But I’ve finally put (metaphorical) pen to paper and will publish them over several posts.
Let’s start with this….
Complexity is a reality.
People are complex. The world is complex.
When we say this we usually mean it figuratively. As in, people are difficult to comprehend. Things that happen in the world don’t always make sense. It’s a surprising place.
But we can literally say that the world is a complex system.
Our reality emerges out of a continual interaction of things – people and other forces.
Dr Karoline Weisner, from the University of Bristol, defines a complex system as:
“something that consists of many elements that are interacting in a disordered way out of which is generated a robust order. There is nothing that controls centrally how things are supposed to behave.”
So far, so good.
Things are complex. They are complex systems and processes made up of chaotic, interacting parts.
From cells to the brain. From human behaviour to the development of cities and countries.
From weather systems to ocean currents; global markets and insect swarms to pandemics.
But what’s also important to understand is all these parts are also interacting with each other.
Complex systems are interwoven and embedded in one another.
So, the world is *really* complex.
What this means for strategy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that as strategists we need to worry too much about *everything* at once.
But bearing this reality in mind allows us to make some credible judgements about our work…
1. Complexity destroys silo mentalities. Comprehending and planning for complexity requires ecosystem thinking, although that may be a crude buzzword. Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues: good strategy requires an “ecological sensibility.” Or as military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it: “The man responsible for evaluating the whole must bring to the task the quality of intuition that perceives the truth at every point.”
For strategists this means that being able to extend research and thinking across as many domains as is knowably possibly is a vital skill. More importantly, being able to spot and connect thinking to unknown or outlying fields, behaviours or domains is an advantageous ability.
2. Complexity is emergent, not reductionist. As per this lovely illustration from @AlexMorris in the Strategy and Planning Handbook.
This means that strategy is a process, not a ‘thing’.
It also means that while research, data and insight are useful inputs for grasping the context to which you are seeking a strategic response, they are ultimately a springboard from which to make an intuitive leap to a solution.
Strategy is about making things greater than the sum of their parts.
It also means that continual monitoring and course correction are super important to manage the ongoing and emergent changes taking place in the wider strategic context.
3. Applying scientific models and data analysis can help comprehend complex realities. This means that strategists empowered with data and meaty computing power can tap into the potential for predicting and simulating future scenarios (as per Dominic Cummings’ Grand Vision).
It’s the logic Professor Shoshana Zuboff applies in her recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalismwhere she argues the data and computational power needed to predict and modulate emotions and behaviour is already available to the big tech firms, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
So what does this matter?
Well, it depends on the level of strategy you are operating at.
Clearly, if you are a creative or comms strategist the ecosystems you need to comprehend and influence are perhaps smaller in scale than say a business strategist. For example, it might be the difference between analysing cultural, consumer, communication and your company domains (a.k.a. the 4Cs) and understanding macro-trends playing out in global economies, industry verticals, regulations, corporate and national cultures.
And the scale expands again for a political strategist, say, or a national policy strategist.
Here it’s about fully grasping a more complex series of domains encompassing national, or increasingly, trans-national communities and societies. Mapping the emerging patterns of behaviours, understanding what they might mean in relation to your desired outcomes and creating policy and legislation accordingly.
I’m simplifying vast and complicated tasks, of course.
But I want to also argue that such a simplification is entirely feasible and, for a good strategist, desirable.
Sun Tzu, for one, was a firm believer. He argued that simplicity co-exists with complexity. Gaddis argues that good leadership is able to see simplicities in complexity.
This is the goal for good strategists. I’ll write more about ‘how’ we do this in my next post.
