Don’t throw out the baby!
complexity Reading reports on the meeting on complexity in organisations that took place in Vienna last week, I started reflecting on my own experiences of complexity. As a lapsed physicist, I know that it is a fundamental law of nature that disorder (which is often much the same as complexity) tends to increase with time. The only way to reverse this trend is to do work – and even then the reduction in disorder is only local. I can’t think of any experiences that suggest that this is not just as true for organisations as for nature in general! Most managers focus mainly on what their own areas need. They seek to improve their areas by doing work (designing and introducing changes of many kinds), and often succeed – but frequently the local success may be at the expense of making the joining up with neighbouring areas worse: overall, complexity may have increased as a result of their work, just as the laws of thermodynamics say it should!

Agree key principles to manage complexity

Avoiding that problem is not easy, and only partial solutions are possible – managers have to be trusted to manage. It can help, however, to provide a top-down framework designed to fix key principles organisation-wide, and then to allow managers the freedom to develop local solutions to problems within that framework. A self-consistent set of
  • Vision and values
  • Strategic objectives
  • Simple and clear structure for decision making
  • Delegated authorities and accountabilities
  • Key metrics
goes a long way to keeping things joined-up, by focusing on those aspects that really matter, but not worrying about controlling the rest. Probably all effective organisations do this at some level, even though the frameworks will not all be equally good. A jar of air contains zillions of molecules, all moving at high speeds, and it is impossible know the complex movements of even one molecule, let alone all of them. But that does not stop us being able to measure the key parameters of pressure, temperature and volume, which are the net result of all those movements. So long as we can define the things we really need to measure, the complexity of the rest does not matter. The challenge is to get that right – and not to throw the baby out with the bath-water in an attempt to over-simplify.
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A Comedy of Errors
poor branding Oxford is a city that is full of tourists, and in the UK where there are tourists, there are brown signs to direct them to the attractions. As well as the name of the attraction, a sign often also has what might best be called (by analogy with IT) an icon. The sign in the picture shows the word ‘Sheldonian' and a mask – the icon for a theatre. As you might guess, it directs you to the Sheldonian Theatre. So far so good. There is just one problem. The theatre in question is not a place where you go to see plays. It is in fact the main ceremonial building of the university, where amongst other things, students are admitted, and all being well, later receive their degrees. I don’t suppose it confuses proud parents attending the ceremony, but I wonder what less well-informed tourists make of it?

Poor branding

I won’t speculate on whether the person who designed the sign realised what they were doing, but it reminded me of an important business truth. Broadly interpreted, what happened here was poor branding – the icon was inconsistent with the meaning, potentially leading to confusion and frustration. The importance of consistency and integrity of messages is universal, whether or not the messages we are giving would conventionally be thought of as branding. When everything we see and hear is consistent, we believe in the authenticity of the message, and that builds trust, be it in a product, an organisation, a person, or a set of signs. When we realise that that consistency is lacking, trust is lost - even if only in the brown signs. Any time you want to build trust, think of yourself as managing your own brand. As change managers, the ability to build trust is one of our most important skills – so we can't afford poor branding. Whatever and however you are communicating (particularly when you are not deliberately communicating at all!), be authentic – then you will also have that essential consistency. Perhaps it does not matter if one set of signs has an odd choice of image, or just how much the signs are trusted. But how many times have you made similar mistakes, which may have had worse consequences?
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