The Chief Innovation Officer

By Anton Rossouw.

Many organisations today banter the word “Innovation” around somewhere in their vision or mission statements or in their marketing jargon, but rarely is Innovation given any justice in the corporate world. 

In reality and in practice Innovation is a throw away word that’s used frequently in corporate speak to sound cool, but not taken seriously. Other similar lip-service wasted words which should be taken seriously is "Strategy", "Empowerment", "Agility", and phrases like “Customer Focus” and “Our People are our Most Valuable Asset”. This stems from executive teams that manage as a closed shop with a siege mentality.

I also love the way that one of my favourite cartoon artists, Tom Fishburne, puts it:

But Innovation MUST be taken seriously, and people are our most valuable asset, and we must focus on our customers because together they are our primary sources of Innovation. 

We have examples of highly Innovative companies such as Apple, Ideo and Samsung that take Innovation seriously. How do they do it?

Innovation is the one “thing” that could generate that one little spark that can be amplified to save a troubled organisation and transform it to flourish in response to the chaos and complexity of modern business dynamics. And Innovation is also a confusing thing because;

• What is Innovation really?
• Who are the Innovators?
• What does an Innovator look like? 
• What do we Innovate with?
• How do we make Innovation happen?

Why not do an innovation perception check and ask 5 managers in your company to talk about Innovation in their workplaces... I have done that and most often than not had 5 different and fairly confused stories. However, as always Wikipedia provides us with a good plausible starting point towards understanding what Innovation can be from a rational, theoretical and practical point of view. Its a good base top start really getting to grips with Innovation, but that in itself is the fun part of the journey. Yes we have alluded to it – we believe Innovation is not a thing but a journey.

We have based our Innovation transformation model on Complexity Science because we believe that Innovation is an emergent phenomena of a Complex Adaptive System, and should be approached as such using techniques that are aligned to complexity theory.

We bundled a group of aligned complexity aligned and derived concepts together that explains to innovation as a Constellation of Creativity. The concepts bundled into the model are Infusion, Messyness, Ecosystems, Networks, Evolution and Exaptation, Creation, Discovery, Technology, Processes, People, Communication and Stories, Deductive and Abductive Reasoning, Design Thinking, and Cognitive Psychology.

Another core concept in our model is that Innovation should have a leader. After all Apple had Steve Jobs who opened them up to be known as one of the worlds leading Innovators. But was Steve Jobs the only or the sole Innovator, or was he only part of an Innovation network?

I suspect the real Innovators were the people in the organisation that could bring Innovation to bear. So in answer to the question who the Innovators are, we believe it it is all of us. Every one of us has the capability to Innovate. Its in our DNA as creative inventive survival driven organisms.

But an innovation leader is still required to help unlock the potential in each of us. The task of this leader is to infuse Innovation into the fabrik of the organisation, and to be Innovative in itself towards creating the conditions for Innovation to emerge from the organisation. We must not allow one small Innovation to be missed because it could have been the "one" to change it all for the better.

If this person was to be given a standard organisation title, they would be called the CIO - Chief Innovation Officer. The job of the CIO is to declare the company as "Open for Innovation".

Lets make Melly Shum Happy!

By Anton Rossouw.

I met Melly Shum some years back, around 1991 as far I can remember, on a cold, damp and windy morning in the industrial city of Rotterdam.

I came around the corner of Witte de Withstraat into Boomgaardstraat, and almost walked into her. When I glanced at her she responded with a faint smile a bit like a modern day Mona Lisa, and a friendly one at that. She was sitting seemingly comfortable and confident at where she works, one hand familiarly rested on an accountants calculator.

A neat and organised workplace, lack of clutter, with professionalism and poise.

• Who was she?
• And what kind of job does she do?
• What inspires her?
• What does she aspire to?
• What is her future?
• What does she want to achieve? 

Then a feeling of dread flowed over me-because I glanced to the right of her and noticed that She Hates Her Job ! What a shame, what a waste! She probably spends at least 8 hours of her work day, week by week and year in year out hating every hour. My only hope for her is that the hours she spends away from work at least she loves.

I met Melly Schum in an artwork by Ken Lum. It looks like your typical advertising poster – just more striking because there is no glitz or glamour.

Sculpture International Rotterdam - photography: Toni Burgering

Maybe Ken Lum as artist, which I believe has astute observation powers and compassion for humankind, was commenting on the industrialisation and de-humanisation of our institutions and organisations, and used this striking advertising imagery to tell us the story of the modern workplace.

That is the story of dominant power creating cultural deserts of machine-like workplaces with soft organic living beings substituting oil, steel, heat and steam. Machines can be built, tuned, manipulated, and broken and discarded when they have served their purpose. What resonates is that the many metaphors of business today reminds of optimised machine like efficiency from the Industrial age and the world wars where machines were used to affect massive destructive power.

Well humans aren’t machine parts, they are complex organisms with emotions, consciousness, self awareness and longing for better futures. I went away with a sense of frustration, thinking about how the "system" can be changed, and if we realistically can have energised, enthusiastic, inspired and happy people in workplaces. People that love their jobs. People that work in places where Profits are not put before People.

Jurgen Appelo, a leading thinker in complexity and business dynamics also met Melly Schum, and decided to do something about it. He created a movement for change, a network of energetic, like-minded but diverse business people across the world that together work towards changing the world of work for the better.

Jurgen called this the Happy Melly Network.

We are proud to be part of the Happy Melly network. We believe that it is good business to have happy people work in our companies. We believe that the workplace of the future will not be described as machines, but as living organisms where value is constantly created by people that like what they do.

We will work hard to create healthy sustainable business ecosystems that will bring about the necessary change. We will help, and in turn be helped by inspired executives and managers in forward thinking organisations to ensure that all those Malcomes and Mellys everywhere love their jobs. We love this job, and its good business!

Complex Adaptive Leadership

By Anton Rossouw.

Complexity Science to me best describe the dynamics and uncertainty of what business face today, and offers us new insights on the true nature of Leadership.

Although Complexity Science is not “one unified thing” but rather a collection of aligned theories, a few concepts are consistently used to describe what’s happening in the complex “systems” space.

This is a very simplistic list but here goes:

• It’s a Network – A complex system consists of a group of interconnected agents that interact locally with those that are close, and within their immediate environment and wider ecosystem.
• It’s Dynamic – Energy and information flows though it (the agents) all the time and it changes its characteristics over time in fairly stable ways or sudden dramatic ways, whereas any figment of stability is always short-lived.
• It’s Non-Linear – Small inputs can have dramatic non-linear effects that through positive and negative feedback loops dampen or amplify the stuff that could lead to either collapse (loss of complexity) or a leap forward (gaining complexity).
• It’s Unpredictable – There are too many interconnected variables in the system to be able to dependably predict where it’s future will be over the medium and longer term. Short term prediction is mostly wrong.
• It Learns – It collectively processes events and perceptions in its memory and then decides on what it knows from current environmental contexts how to act next, and then remembers the experiences from acting for it's next iteration.
• Its Emergent – States of newness emerge from the interactions of the agents when they find themselves at high levels of local and environmental interaction commonly known as at “the edge of chaos”, which is a bit of an overstatement.
• Its Special – The diversity and special nature of certain agents and the changes that result from their interaction contribute to innovative emergence that could lead to either or all of collapse, revolution, evolution, exaptation.

The above describes what is commonly known as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). This aptly presents an interesting perspective and practical model to describe our social world of business, organisation, company, social group, city, movement, government, and from the natural world tribes, species, ecologies.

Now the question is what do we do with this new insight...

• Is it "correct" and authentic to use CAS as a model?
• How do we understand business as a CAS? 
• Can we influence a CAS to move into a direction that we want to nudge it to?
• And how do we do this?
• Can we stand “apart from” the CAS or are we “a part of” the CAS ?
• If we get this right will it create better business?
• What is we nudge it and it goes haywire?  

To approach these questions with answers, a range of passionate and inspiring authors and bloggers such as Ralph Stacey, Jurgen Appelo, Dave Snowden, Brian Goodwin, Glenda Eoyang, Brian Arthur, Melanie Mitchell, Nicholas Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam presented us with many plausible and exciting ideas. Fundamentally they provide answers on how to understand and influence a business as a Complex Adaptive System, and make different format decisions in the way we act and respond to strategic thinking and operational events. However, from an evidence perspective Complex Adaptive Leadership remains mysterious because it is difficult to conduct qualitative research on complexity.

All I know is that as leaders we need to live immersed within uncertainty and ambiguity and act in positive ways to "nudge" changes in our agents and affect changes to our ecosystems to incubate the ideal conditions for "emergence". And then let the system find its way, and then nudge some more.

However, when acting like this  there is no one right thing to do except to be responsible for and with the complex system, think about it with a complexity mindset, and implement simple things to move it along.

This rational mysteriousness is eloquently explained by Dr. Shamin Bodhanya for the University of Natal in his Ted talk.

In support Dr. Jon Whitty from the University of Southern Queensland also offer great supportive perspectives on his YouTube Channel on the subject of viewing projects as Complex Adaptive Systems:

De-Certification Boot Camp

By Anton Rossouw.

I think the world needs to be de-cluttered from certification bloat i.e. “De-Certification”.

Certification has now become a bunch of badges pinned to lapels and “must have” entry criteria for certain jobs. So if you are certified in “whatever” with limited experience you could arguably get a job over someone with great experience and no certification? I have seen this happen in recruitment! Sound strange to me. 

Certification is basically a good idea, but it has run into chaotic practices. It exists because large standards training bodies and their ORG’s need to remunerate boards and hoards through profits generated from training, certification and re-certification. I don't say that training per se is a bad thing, it's a great thing, but not for the sake of certification but for the sake of learning.

As an example take Project Management methodology.  Which certification is best is constantly being bantered around in the constellation of project management theory and practice. There is a lot of confusion about what the “best” project management approach is. Of course the one that one is certified in is "the best”.

As soon as a person is “certified” in whatever strand is most popular in a certain region at a certain time then they tend to get blinkered and fight vehemently that either PMBOK or Prince2 or SCRUM or whatever is the only “right” approach to manage projects and the other approaches are “wrong”. Over the years I have often been caught between such methodology arguments that is akin to brainwashing and the worst cases of monotheistic religious dogma at its best.

After all we have to pay our money up front, buy a manual, provide proof of work, study and prepare, attend training, and write an exam. Or get certified in “all of them” then you hold your options open – an expensive exercise.

I think we need to be freed and liberated from carrying this burden of certification. Press the “Cntl-Alt-Del” button on our biased certification brain area.

To get back to basics we should conduct De-Certification boot-camps at a wilderness retreat where certifieds can become De-Certified and thus be liberated to think in an open slow-thinking un-constrained creative way about approaching contexts, and in a Zen like manner craft a tailored response. Not ram in a square problem into a round methodology hole.

By the way NO De-Certification certificate will be provided at the end of the boot camp. Being freed from dogma is reward in itself. The De-Certification boot camp will be an emergent un-event over two days where topics such as below can be openly discussed:

• Confess our certification sins and commit to become cleansed of dogma.
• Understand the constellation of project management methodologies and reasons why they exist and when/where they can best be applied.
• Confirm that there is no one right methodology that applies at any one time.
• Explore the power and failure of command-and-control to do things right and do the right things. Then explore uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity.
• Agree businesses and project are all different and unique and have different contexts.
• It should be about waste removal, early value, innovation, adaption and not only machine like efficiency and cost saving.
• Think complexity and simplicity before adopting simple recipe processes.
• Think about and explore our thinking biases so that we can make better decisions.
• Understand social, environmental, technical, cultural, commercial and competitive environments first.
• Explore why a project or business or group is an evolutionary Complex Adaptive System that has a lifecycle and needs constant stimulation and change.
• Its all about great decision-making in the moment based on available information, contexts and learning, and holding the fact in tension that most decisions will not be "right".
• Anti-methodology is the right methodology mostly but some methodology is better than none.
• Crafting a methodology and evolving it the be fit for purpose as time unfolds.
• Convincing others to be adaptive and live with the fun of ambiguity and uncertainty.
• Creating coherent networks with innovation at core and anti-group-think characteristics.
• Getting to technical down and dirty delivery where things are physical and tangible matters more than concepts and politics.
• Leadership is about agility, inspiration, vision, progress before perfection, and getting on with job.
• Have passion for our projects and fun at work.
• Explore future spaces with fun exercises and innovative games mostly outside of the office.

Why not join us on a De-Certification boot camp and become a methodology agnostic heretic! Fight the good fight and join the revolution of the De-Certified. Together we will change the world! Down with methodology zealots! 

PS. This does not mean that you need to throw your Certificates out with the proverbial bathwater. But it does mean that we will better be able to navigate the complexities of contexts and changing conditions and fit the best tools from a range of possible options available - horses for courses as the English gentlemen used to say!

As and example I like what Software Developments Experts have to say about A New Deal for Software Development.    

Whats with Sport?

By Anton Rossouw.

Sport elicits emotions in most people. This has been true from the day that societies, communities and tribes have had free time to play more and be active in things other than survival. This was due to the emergence of organisation and technology.  

Reflection on and passion for sport ranges from individual achievement events to teams competing agains each other in many different ways.

The Greeks created the Olympics games as a civilised response to not go to war and kill or get killed. Sport is an anti-thesis to war as a competitive response and much more acceptable. Lets replace all war with the fun of sport - but remain vigilant that sport does not become war - just a wild idea!

The Aztecs played powerful ball games that created focus points for their civilisation.  

The English empire brought sport to many of their outposts. Thats why we have to thank them for our Sri-Lanka, Indian and Zimbabwe cricket teams.

And its also used as a powerful metaphor in business narrative and stories. We talk of "teams", "kicking goals", and in project management "kick-off", "ballpark figures" and "on target". Others are "jump the gun", "the ball is in your court" and "don't take your eye off the ball".  

So overall its use is in positive,  inspiration and motivational language. Its synonymous with performance, trying harder, achieving our best, going further, faster and quicker.

It also applies to being "Agile" - so sport metaphors are ideal to use to illustrate the change in paradigm and thinking, energy, passion, practice, learning, improvement, and nimbleness required to become an agile enterprise.

We know that in order to implement the Agile organisation we need to "jump over some hurdles" to "create a high performance team". 

Lets when transforming to an Agile enterprise continue "playing the game", "practice to lift our performance", "climb the highest mountain" and "excel against our competition" and "hit the bulls-eye".

Agile Enterprise as a Sport?  

Scrum Masters, Sprints, training bootcamp, being coached, feedback from our recent game, improving our score. Yes, agile terminology already use a lot of sport metaphors. The video below done by those crazy and fun guys in Benelux offers the best illustration of how the game could be played:   

The Power of Management 3.0

By Anton Rossouw.

Management 3.0 is a revolutionary enterprise transformation approach that converts managers from a traditional simple command and control style of management to Agile Management. This transformation is driven by establishing a deep understanding of complexity theory and providing people with multiple tools and insights to effectively work in complex contexts and situations, and respond to them in agile ways.

Management 3.0 originated from the brilliant mind of Jurgen Appelo, a complexity thinker, who captured it in the form of a book and as training. Detailed information about the book and the training can be found at www.management30.com      

It presents many practical, integrated and understandable explanations of theories with exercises that opens up our minds in a playful way to embrace uncertainty and complexity, therefore creating in us a better understanding and analysis of complex situations so that better plans and decisions can be made to develop better solutions and create better outcomes for our organisations.

Management 3.0 leaders and practitioners become agile and adaptive, and more resilient, innovative and creative. It shifts the view and mindset away from that of wrestling with problems to identifying, grasping and enabling opportunities.

It changes the way that we view our projects and work by bringing together a range of the latest leading theories and practices from complexity science, chaos theory, evolution and adaptation, to show us a more natural way to get work done. It explains why and how the new Agile leadership approaches work better to getting things done than traditional ways. It is the new and more productive approach to getting more work done in a more effective way.

When the Management 3.0 Agile techniques and tools are applied, it makes teams more coherent, enables self-organisation to happen and team members feel more motivated to take ownership of their work and problem solving challenges. The Management 3.0 approach provides high levels of clarity on topics important for high performance organisations such as:

• Why everything is not simple.

• What complexity, complicatedness and simplicity is.

• What complexity thinking is and how do we do it.

• How Agile product development works.

• Understanding traditional management.

• Moving on to better management models.

• How to energise people.

• How to make self organisation happen.

• How to empower high performance teams.

• How to lead and manage at the same time.

• How to align constraints.

• Understanding formal and informal structures.

• How to embrace change and opportunity.

• How to really improve things.

• How to become more resilient.

• Agile rules to manage complex projects.

The Stoos Transformation has begun !

By Anton Rossouw.

The philosophies and methods of Agile is fast infiltrating the world of general management. This is due to the many successes due to adopting Agile mindsets to the way that software is delivered. This has stimulated rapid evolution fueled by practical learning causing thinkers, practitioners and authors world wide to project Agile into management teams, boardrooms and workplaces outside of IT and software product development.

And so this gave rise to the Stoos network .

It was incubated on January 2012 at Schwyz in Switzerland by 21 concerned and inspired change agents swarming around the leadership problems we face today. Together they agreed that there must be a better way. A rallying call to action was developed:

“Reflecting on leadership in organizations today, we find ourselves in a bit of a mess. We see reliance on linear, mechanistic thinking, companies focusing more on stock price than delighting customers, and knowledge workers whose voices are ignored by the bosses who direct them. All these factors are reflected in the current economic crisis, increased inequity, bankruptcies and widespread disillusionment.

There has to be a better way”

The Stoos network has rapidly grown exponentially to become an organic self organizing learning community of like minded radical business change agents, that share a passion to learn from each other and find the better ways to change organizations for the better.

We go about this by sharing problems, discussing new ideas, theories, paradigms and practices, and implementing them as safe-to-fail experiments to enact positive change. These abundant ideas bring new ways of thinking about systems, driving sustainability, developing leadership, transforming management practices, fostering high performance teams, embracing complexity, implementing simplicity, unlocking innovation, becoming agile and adaptive, and growing new organic organizational structures.

We participated in the first Stoos Stampede that was held on 6-7 July 2012 in Amsterdam, in a stunningly beautiful conference venue De Roode Hoet in Keizersgragt. It was implemented as a classic “un-conference” by organisers Jurgen Appelo and his team. More than 200 inspired people from all over the world attended the spirited sessions of conversation, each contributing and sharing in their own unique way their own unique perspectives and experiences. I am sure we all went away vowing to put new things into practice to find the better way. There were interesting, interactive and collaborative sessions such as:

• Indicators for Companies Culture and How to Change

• Facilitating effective interventions from within organizations

• Management and corporate culture hacking

• Agile transformation - What should be the best approach?

• Gamification of the working environment

• Guided Self-Organisation: Creating a Learning Network

• Sociocracy: new governance structure for organizations

• Management is dead! Grasping the new model & methods for change

• Using Personal-Professional Growth to Adapt Business Cultures

• From Overwhelming Complexity to Effective Simplicity

• Organize for Complexity. How to make work work again

• Organization Design powered by Evolution

• Leading change good practices

• Learning for complexity. New approaches for knowledge-building

• Stoosian Emergent Organizational Practices from the wild

• Dealing with Generation Bottleneck

• The 10 Worst Management Practices, And How To Turn Them Around

• Using Complexity to Accelerate Higher Consciousness

• Being the change you want to see in the world

• Extremely simple and practical mgmt theory: is that possible?

• Fairytales for organizational change

From this we see that there are very passionate people set on creating better leaders and better organisations. The key is sharing knowledge and learning in practice. It will take not a massive revolution, but a quiet and sustained social revolution leading continuously upwards to better places.

Become committed as we are to contribute actively to the Stoos movement!

Stoos is always seeking passionate people that can become part our learning network. Our individual positive contributions can create valuable change that will transform organisations to become more balanced, humane and sustainable workplaces. Its all about change for the better !

Dealing with Complexity

By Anton Rossouw.

Dealing with ever increasing levels of complexity and fast pased change has become one of the biggest issues for business today. Eddie Obeng talks at TED about how we need to think differently:

Large enterprises has identified change, complexity and the uncertainty that it brings as the most significant challenge as quoted from the 2010 IBM CEO Study:

“In our past three global CEO studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was their most pressing challenge. In 2010, our conversations identified a new primary challenge: complexity. CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.”

Executives now operate in a business environment characterised by spiralling complexity that at best confuse our strategies, mostly disrupt our decisions and at worst paralyse our business. Combine this with the general sense of uncertainty about the future and it becomes very difficult to develop coping strategies that we can depend on.

An exacerbating issue is the fact that traditional management training does not equip executives and managers to address complexity. The bulk of current education, training and coaching is focused on command and control strategies of organisation that constrains dynamics in order to maintain states of equilibrium.

The dynamics of chaos, complexity, flux and change does not feature strongly in their understanding, and when it is inevitably encountered it triggers a massive amount of dissonance that leads to confrontational controlling behaviours.

In spite of these impediments we are not powerless! We can do something about complexity. On the positive side complexity offers fantastic opportunities for us to exploit. However, we firstly need to change the way we think about complexity.

We need to understand how to harness complexity and respond to it in ways that will benefit us! The answer is in reaching towards a new understanding informed by complexity theory, and through that change the way that we deal with complexity. Not fighting it but embracing it.

Embracing complexity means that we must overcome the dissonance that it creates, and work actively with it and within it as opposed to rejecting it. When we become comfortable with complexity, we start understanding its fluid, flexible and ever changing interconnected nature, and can then start thinking differently about contexts, opportunities and alternatives. This develops more insightful options for strategic decision making. This changes the way that we think and act to become more cohesive, resilient, adaptive, innovative, and agile.

A good example of this type of change in competency has been captured in part by what is now commonly referred to as the “Agile Movement” (http://www.agilemanifesto.org/), which originated from within the IT programming fraternity in response to failures in the traditional way that software was developed.

The Agile movement has influenced the way we perceive, plan, analyse, think, make decisions, and act. It is not only a tool, but a mindset as well.

For organisations, the Agile movement is a great vehicle for operational improvement because it is as applicable for business development as it is for software development.

The receptiveness that Complexity studies creates combined with the tools and methods that the Agile movement brings, unlocks in us new potential for success not only for software development, but also business in general. This empowers us to become more confident in the face of uncertainty and act more decisively and informed.

Although Agile techniques can be taught without an understanding of Complexity Theory, it is much more effective if the journey to Agility is preceded by and integrated with a deep understanding of Complexity.

This new knowledge generates a refreshing new leadership style that empowers us with the confidence to work with complex problems, ambiguity and uncertainty, whilst enabling us to understand, embrace and exploit complexity in agile ways.

This improves our overall contextual clarity, receptiveness and creativity, and enables us to create the special conditions that foster high performance teams that stimulate emergent business opportunities, and then harness these opportunities in agile ways to advance the organisation.

This drives organisations to better decision-making that leads to new futures containing enhanced levels of sustainability and growth. These new futures will exceed those of competitors that remain entrenched in traditional management styles. We can now effectively deal with complexity to our personal benefit, our teams’ benefit, and our organisations benefit.

Complex Decision Making

By Anton Rossouw.

We live in a world of uncertainty because the future is inherently un-knowable, but we can make sense of it and guess what the future may hold for us. That is complex decision making where there is no one obvious right answer to any question but multiple answers that can lead down multiple paths.

Business and project success is directly related to good decision-making practices and processes. When it comes to deciding about tomorrow, next month, and next year, executives and managers have to make a few big directive decisions and a lot of small decisions during business and project lifecycles, leading us to unfolding alternative future paths.

The one thing I have come to realise about decision making effectiveness, especially when it is about strategies for acting in an un-knowable future, is that apparently minor decisions taken lightly can cause huge unexpected surprises later on. The small decisions are as important as the few large decisions.

One throw-away decision made not well constructed and understood early in a project can generate a storm and close the doors of opportunity, or we may be lucky and new doors open!

Therefore, when it comes to the future and strategic decision making in uncertain contexts, it is important to practice considered decison making even for what seems to be minor decisions. The key is to embrace the complexity of our contexts through awareness, openness to alternatives, contextualisation and insightful sensemaking.

We tend to repeat history by making decisions according to what worked for us in the past. But no two contexts, two situations, two projects or two organisations can be exactly the same, so we should be vigilant to not re-use our old decision paths without clearly making sense of and understanding the differences in context.

If a decision has strategic implications that may send our futures off into multiple alternative paths (as opposed to deciding what to have for lunch), we need a process of embracing complexity to sense the most simple "right" path under the conditions. That is as good as it is going to get!

Experience in making decisions has also taught me to be cautious and aware and to question the "accepted and proven path" because missing a decision "tweak" early on may cause problems later ! Apparently innocent decisions could have the most dire consequences when you least expect it. When this happens we lament that we should have seen "it" coming or should have approached "it" from a different angle.

In order to better think though our decisions (ie. considered decision making), some steps below towards improving the robustness of single person (as opposed to team based) strategic decision-making processes:

• Describe the situation and context to yourself and decide if it is complex, complicated or simple.

• If it is simple, just make a decision as quickly as possible and move on!

• If it is complicated ask an expert (if you are not that expert), but if it is complex then:

• Decide why the outcome of this decision is important.

• List principles that may guide your decision-making within that context.

• Ask if you have to make the decision now or later (urgency).

• Ask what the likely impact is (importance).

• Explore what, how, when, who, with what, and how many while reflectig on the context.

• Conduct an environment analysis of decision surrounds; (political, cultural, business, technology, skills, resourcese etc.).

• List relevant information that may inform the decision.

• Assess what is similar and different between familiar past and current decision situations.

• List any next decisions that may need to be made as a result of this decision.

• Brainstorm alternative event pathways, outcomes and opportunities.

• Create on a couple of likely alternative answers, don’t decide yet.

• Let it simmer for a while.

• Ask yourself what you have missed.

• Decide on an answer.

• Make the decision knowing that it may be wrong and you may have to make a different decision tomorrow !

To sum up, understand if the context is complex, complicated or simple, and follow appropriate decision making paths.

To resolve uncertainty (in your head at least) procrastinate only when necessary, make lists, gather relevant information, analyse alternatives, explore, wait for the a-ha moment then be decisive, and be honest later if your decisions stuffed up ! Prepare to change your mind and defend new positions.

The bottom line is that robust complex decision sense making and consideration processes will in all probabilty lead to positive outcomes but if they don't because of the unherent complexity and uncertainty of the future, then we at least have constructed a better foundation to approach and understand future decisions.

The only alternative to considered decision making is to do it from the gut quickly and intuitively and go work with the flow ! That is equally as valid but less justifyable.

What is Simplexity ?

By Anton Rossouw.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) had very deep insight on the balance between Complexity and Simplicity when he said:

"I wouldn't give a nickel for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

In relation, my definition has little insight and much ignorence, because as a mere beginner on this side of complexity I can only articulate my simplistic viewpoint which is that simplexity is the dynamic combination, interaction and flow between Complexity and Simplicity within organic (i.e. living) systems.

Simplexity recognises that complexity in everything we experience has simple rules behind it. These simple rules guide the system dynamics.

By understanding and harnessing the simple rules we can influence and guide the development of complexity within a system by creating the right conditions and events that will cause the system to change, which means we may desire it to:

1) negatively collapse and start over or disappear,

2) re-organise itself into different random directions that will create new possibilities, or

3) evolve to become more resilient or specialised and deliver positive benefits.

The simple rules and the richness of (or lack of) the starting condition combine to become the fuel that powers the creation of complexity and certain potential and emergent value in systems, be it within our organisations or our projects.

This applies in organistions as the recognition that behind every complex problem are simple solutions that are not apparent at first but have to be elaborated through sensemaking processes. A guiding prinicple is that the "obvious" initial answer is likely wrong, but could be usefull.

Immersing ourself into complex contexts allow processes of emergent sensemaking to happen that creates insight into the simple rules and the alternative paths that they influence. The key to understanding these rules are that there is no single right answer or single dominant strategy, but that an emergent set of simple rules, conditions and opportunities will interact dynamically within the environment and power it to respond non-linearly to the right stimulus.

We can at best create rules, principles, conditions and environments for a complex system to evolve into a direction that we believe it should move towards, be it becoming more sustainable, more specialised, more predatory and opportunitic, more dormant and responsive, or collapsed and dissolving.

That can be described as a process of pressurisation through constant, consistent nudging and nagging into dynamical movement (with positive or negative consequences).

We can influence it through our participation and create conditions for it, but we can never predict where exactly it will move to, and we can never control it perfectly. The only control we have is over our self to participate and act as part of (or removal from) the complex system.

Simplexity is the ability to process, understand and make sense of complex contexts, evironmental conditions and system dynamics and the simple rules that govern, drive and influence it, and then harnessing that understanding to create new paths and conditions for the future to unfold into, without being fooled by our biases, dispositions and backgrounds, but driven by our passions to better futures.