Complexity Inside & Out: Understanding and Working with Complexity at many scales.
Reflection on Complexity Inside and Out by Chris Corrigan (Co-founder)
How do we do good work, and influence positive change, when we don’t know what to do?
Over the past 26 years we have worked with all kinds of organizations and communities facing change, conflict, growth, uncertainty and the need to make important decisions together. Increasingly, we find ourselves working with people who are facing situations where there is no obvious answer, even when there is plenty of expertise in the room.
Sometimes the challenge is organizational culture or leadership. Sometimes it is strategy or systems change. Sometimes it is simply the difficulty of trying to work well together when circumstances keep changing, or finding new ways to approach a problem that seems intractable.
These are complex situations, and one of the most useful things we have learned is that complexity requires different ways of working. There are lots of problems for which expertise, analysis and planning are exactly what is needed. But when people are involved, conditions are changing, and every action we take changes the situation itself, it becomes much harder to know in advance what will work.
For us, a key question has become: How do we do good work when we don't know what to do? Complexity practice helps us distinguish between situations where we can rely on what we know and situations where we need to learn our way forward. Complexity informed approaches help us to develop more ways of seeing what is happening and gives us more choices about how to respond.
Complexity practice, means developing our capacity to:
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notice patterns before rushing to explain or solve them;
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bring different perspectives together to see more of what is happening;
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understand some of the conditions and constraints that are holding patterns in place;
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try things at a scale where we can learn without overcommitting ourselves;
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make sense of what happens and adjust our next move accordingly.
Over the years we have also come to understand that this work isn't only about what is happening in organizations and systems. We are part of the complexity too.
The uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of control that characterize complex situations can provoke some very familiar responses in human beings. We can become attached to certainty, defend what we think we know, narrow our attention, stop listening well, or reach for control precisely when the situation requires curiosity and openness to other possibilities.
This is why we call the course Complexity Inside & Out.
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