This is at the core of agility: instead of trying to have the answer to everything, have the ability to find the answer fast. And then find a different answer tomorrow, in a different way. When it works, it’s simple: an entity able to adapt and respond to environmental pressures in a seemingly effortless way, because the agility is coded into it’s DNA. Responsive by design.

When it doesn’t work, the organisation may be able to adapt to circumstance, but at great energy and cost. It’s the difference between technique and brute force. A computer can crack any code by brute force alone, by trying every possible combination, but it’s not efficient. We are aiming for efficiency.

Take my flight back from New York last week: as the plane was cancelled, i had to get booked onto a new flight. But i got caught in a loop between British Airways, who i had booked with, and United Airlines, who owned the plane i was moved onto. The result was that i spent three hours on the phone trying to get it resolved: at every stage, the systems, scripts, responses and replies added complexity, largely generated by the inflexibility of a system designed to respond to ‘normal‘, not respond to change. Complexity kills agility.

Nobody had permission to resolve it. Several people empathised, which is nice, but utterly ineffective. When the person on the phone says “i can understand the problem, i can understand the solution, but i cannot enact it” you know that you lack agility. Lethargy codified into process and system.

At one level, you can read this as just poor customer service, but it goes much much deeper than that: it’s about how fit you are to compete, how likely you are to survive.

Complexity kills Innovation. Complexity will kill your business if you are unable to adapt.

So what are the tools for mastering complexity? I’d suggest the places to start are with narrative and community. Traditionally the knowledge has resided in tribes, in groups who informally subvert process in the name of efficiency, but do it in hidden ways. As an organisation, being able to tap into this community, to use it’s ‘sense making‘ capability and somehow formalise it is key.

I heard a nice story the other day, a military recruit who came out of a training session: his future squad leader put his hand on his shoulder and said “that was nice, but this is what we’ll actually do in the field so as not to get us both killed“. The convergence of codified knowledge and experience, leading to agility. In the first world war, both sides kept going over the top and running into the machine gun bullets because they lacked agility in thinking or action, they lacked permission to even question ‘why?‘.

Our starting point has to be finding ways to hear the organisational narrative, ways to hear where the complexity lies, but not with a view to capturing and killing it, rather with a view to understanding how the tribes currently circumnavigate it.

Remember: complexity breeds complexity. Rule based approaches to agility will fail because they are subverted by further complexity. This is why most social media policies fail: because they attempt to patch up every hole, rather than providing spaces and permissions to operate within The same with regulation for banks: it may tell us what’s wrong, but it surely doesn’t tell us what’s right.

I’ve looked at this before, thinking about ‘fairness‘. Many organisations tell us what is unfair, discriminatory, biased, but fail to help us find fairness within that frame. Complexity creates a cage, but it doesn’t give us agility.

At a simple level, it’s about providing spaces for experimentation and rehearsal. It’s about providing mechanisms for the three levels of narrative: personal, co-created (community) and organisational. What do we learn as individuals, how do we reflect on that and take it into community. As community, how do we ‘sense make‘ these multiple individual narratives, and as an organisation, how do we respond to the personal and community stories. That’s the route to simplicity.