Complex is not the same as complicated. Industrial Age got us used to the complicated mindset. Collaborative Age is the the era of complexity. And here lies a fundamental difference overlooked and misunderstood by so many people.
This is the first of a series of 3 posts about complexity and how we can thrive through it.
A watch is very complicated, as are numerous appliances we are using everyday. Yet, its outcome is highly predictable (it’s a watch after all!). We can rely on it to run precisely for days or months in a row. Each component fits nicely, mechanically in a single system. Each component does not have the choice of doing whatever it wants. It is driven by the system to perform reliable its single function.
While in a complex system is also an intricate buildup of many interrelated contributors, there is one main difference: each contributor has the choice, follows its own interest.
Like the situation in Afghanistan, the outcome is difficult to predict, more difficult even to steer in the expected direction if we are one of the players.
Science added another category of complex systems: some purely mathematical systems that include retro-action and multiple iteration loops can have results that become unpredictable (chaotic systems), even if the initial mathematical formula was simple. It is the case of weather and other important systems around us (ref the famous analogy of the butterfly flying in Brazil that can create a storm in the US).
The Industrial Age viewed the world as complicated; it meant that there was supposed to be a way to understand how it worked and there after, predict where it was going. As such, predictability of your behavior and your results in the vast system of production was expected; in exchange there was some predictability in your career development, based on your formal education.
Alas the mechanistic view of the Industrial Age did not resist to reality. We now know that the world is undoubtedly complex. Totally interconnected. And as such, forever unpredictable. Forever impossible to divide in small parts, cogs, that would nicely fit together to create a perfect, predictable world.
Of course, the ever accelerating development of connectivity in the past decades has dramatically increase the complexity of today’s world. We are all now fully inter-dependent, part of a large complex system.
We know now that we are in a complex world, and that just being a cog following instructions is not a sustainable way to success. That major unexpected events are drawing the picture of the world much more powerfully than the succession of daily small changes. That an idea in remote Afghanistan can create a storm in New-York and change forever the lives of billions of people.
Let go of the mindset of the Industrial Age. The world is not complicated, it is just complex!
In the following weekly posts, we’ll examine some properties of complex systems, before finally discussing what we can really do today to thrive in a complex system. Check out next week the followup post on complexity!
