Simple Habits for Complex Times

In today’s VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), predicting the future can be difficult, if not impossible.

Despite this complexity, many leaders prefer staying in familiar territory, assuming they already know what will work best.

In fact, many of us choose the path that is most comfortable or confirming. Rather than bringing genuine curiosity and openness, we converge too soon on what makes sense to us right now.

When confronting complex problems, focusing on what is probable, based on an assessment of past practices, can actually lead us down the wrong path.

When we focus on what is probable, we are adopting a filter created in the past for judging the future. This necessarily constrains the set of possibilities available to us as we use the past to tell us what is likely to work in the future.

Marshall McLuhan called this “driving into the future using only our rear view mirror’.

In a complex environment, it makes more sense to remain in discovery as long as we can so that we can focus instead on what is possible.

In Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders, Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston point to our common practice of pruning and simplifying rather than stretching and expanding to help us deal more thoughtfully with a complex world.

The authors suggest three “habits of mind” to help deal more effectively with complexity:

Asking different questions

Taking multiple perspectives

Seeing systems

Asking new questions that move us beyond the constraints of the past can open us up to new and different possibilities.

Saying what we think, while listening to the ways we might be wrong, creates safety for others while widening our perspective.

Complexity theory teaches us to look at the current system and how it operates, so that we can strengthen those elements we want and weaken those elements we don’t.

When faced with complex challenges or uncertain outcomes, we must know that it isn’t just about how smart we are or how hard we work.

To become nimbler and to respond with more agility in these complex times, we must adopt new practices that stretch us and keep us in discovery longer.