5 Leading in Organizational Complexity Skillfully
Skillful
Possessed of or displaying skill. (Source: Merriam-Webster)
We now turn our focus toward the specific skills required for all leaders in today’s complex organizations. To be effective, to create the right value your organization needs to create, and to create that value in the right way, you need to be possessed of and accomplished with skills for risk awareness, sense making, and persuasion. As we are working with the skills we need in our everyday work, we are very much addressing our practice as leaders, as those charged with managing the organization’s value creation processes. Thus, we will engage these three skills at the three fundamental practice skills you need to possess and be accomplished in to navigate today’s complex organizations.
-Dr. James R. Barker-
Here is a useful set of materials that offer you more depth to your understanding of how we experience risk as humans. As you engage these materials, note how our awareness and experience of risk shapes how we make sense and then shapes how we act. In particular, note how we make sense of risk, how we use patterns, for example, to help us comprehend how ambient risk is unfolding in front of us.
First, listen to this two-part podcast from the CBC on how humans interact with risk.
CBC on risk
Now explore how the ways that we have understood risk in finance have evolved over the years. Here is a fascinating story of the market meltdown twice before the most recent market meltdown – the story of Long Term Capital Management. Note here how the experience of risk affects us as humans, particularly here in finance, but also more broadly in our organizations and individual sense making. Also note here the power we give to patterns, especially formulas, to help us make sense of risk. But also note how complexity plays out here to push our formulas and pattern-based sense making away from the path toward creating the right value the right way. Make sure to catch the second to last monologue of the documentary (about 47 minutes in) for a fascinating discussion about how we can leverage our experience to make good sense of risk.
These days we can find a number of articles on risk related to the pandemic. While more societal focused, these articles are also useful for our ability to appreciate the risks we face in our organizations.
In complexity, all our organizational actions have an ethical component, as we will explore more when we get to persuasion. This short article from Strategy + Business explores the risk – ethics connection:
Weighing the risk ethics of requiring vaccinations
Because all risk assessments have ethical components, these assessments often become intense places of disagreement and conflict. The recent trucker protests across Canada exemplified how shifting assessments of risk in the pandemic create division and confrontation among us – in society, in families, and in our organizations. Here are two examples of how polarization arises when we feel the effects of risk intensely – especially the over-time effects of cumulative risk:
When we face such intensity and polarization around risk, we often look to outside sources to help us gain perspective. Here are two examples of news sources on the protests from outside Canada:
Notice how when organizations face intensely felt risks, they often call on help from outside consultants, especially change management consultants that specialize in difficult and high-risk organizational moves. The use of consultants in this situation is a method for overcoming those intense effects of risk by adding a new, hopefully more neutral, perspective to our sense making and action.
Sensemaking as an intellectual term and field of study extends from the work of Karl Weick one of the most influential management theorists of the late 20th Century. Here is a quick and useful overview of his work:
As you watch the video, you will see a number of connections to how we have discussed organizational complexity, organizational movement, and the role of organizational communication.
You can find more on Karl Weick at his Wikipedia link
Here is an example from the renown complexity science author and consultant, David Snowden, that illustrates how sense making informs the framing of our thinking about how human beings act in complex organizations:
If you want more information on heuristics as an intellectual concept, skim the Wikipedia page:
For more depth on the work of Ian McCammon and heuristic traps, read through these sites:
Summit Post: Human Factors in Avalanche Incidents
Ian McCammon: Heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents: Evidence and implications
For more depth on risk, sense making, and change, you can watch these two videos from my MBA-Leadership classes:
Thinking Differently about Change (Note: Only Dalhousie University Panopto users can view this video)
Moving Complex Initiatives Through Time (Note: Only Dalhousie University Panopto users can view this video)
Note in this video that the discussion of the three tests of sense making is somewhat different from what I have discussed for our class. I have recently updated and adapted this discussion. When you encounter the discussion of the sense making tests, remember how I have developed the concept for our class.
In the video, I discuss why the term risk awareness is more useful than the more common term situational awareness. Here is a video that, while using the term situational awareness, presents a useful visual account of the processes I discuss in the lesson video.
Here is an example how we human beings engage in risk awareness, in less than useful ways. Note the history of dam building and engineering in the US and how this history, this risk awareness context, shapes the degree to which key managers missed signs of failure at the dam:
We do recognize the usefulness of risk awareness in our organizations and our work activity. And we all take precautions when know that we are facing serious risks, like wearing hard hats on construction sites, standing up from our desks and stretching and walking around periodically, or giving our company’s best customer priority in our attention.
As the lesson video noted, risk awareness in complexity is about our perception, knowledge, and understanding of hazards and threats to the organization’s ability to create the right value, the right way, right now. Sometimes we get risk right, sometimes we fail. Thus, our ability to be aware of ambient risks becomes a key point others use to evaluate our work in organizations. Read through this assessment of the Ottawa Police Force’s ability to anticipate risks in the recent trucker occupation serves as a useful example of how we are held to account for our risk awareness capabilities.
What can police do to stop an Ottawa-style occupation? | The Star (Feb.03/22)
You can access the Toronto Star through the Dalhousie Library system.
And sometimes we just get lucky in our assessment of risks. That is how complexity works with us:
What Being a Volcanologist Is Like – The Atlantic – Oct.18/21
