Complexity is a matter of keen investigation in this blog. Leading in complexity is an essential area for the Collaborative Age. In his post ‘Scaling Awareness‘, Doug Silsbee gives some interesting hints. This approach stems from a necessary self-awareness.
“Action in a complexity context is less about directing and engineering a process towards our desired outcomes. It is more about establishing an overall direction, discerning the present state of the system and the dynamics as best we can see them, stabilizing our internal condition, and facilitating a collective exploration of this context along with others who can help with the discernment of what we might invite to come forward.”
Thus the recommendation is to
- Normalize complexity. Have real conversations about how complexity is different.
- Center yourself. Having done the inner work to be able to de-couple your own inner state from the stresses of your context, act in ways that support the others in your system in doing the same.
- Design and conduct safe-to-fail experiments: Conduct small scale, cheap, interesting experiments that are designed to explore how the system works, and that can be amplified if they do something worthwhile, or recovered from quickly if they don’t work.
- Organize around direction, not goals.
What I find particular interesting in this approach is the recognition that there is a need to work on self centering as well as taking action on the external aspects.
