Why Do We Struggle with Complex Challenges?

The simple answer is, complex challenges are complex.

While that’s a correct answer, it’s not helpful in improving our abilities to manage complexity.  With complexity, we know simple solutions usually fail miserably. That’s unless the solution to a complex challenge fits on a bumper sticker and you are a politician.

Whether it is improving our personal health, eliminating homelessness or reducing income inequality, we know there are not simple solutions to these complex challenges.

What is Complexity?

The unpredictability of many impacting elements (people, communities and realities) operating, interacting and reacting in both certain and uncertain ways.

If we want to lose weight and adopt a healthy lifestyle, we know we need to eat better and increase our physical activities. While these simple solutions works for some people, it has not been successful for the 71 percent of United States adults who are either overweight or obese.

Mission success is affected by the many impacting elements; the people around us (families, friends, co-workers), our communities (work, social, neighbors, city) and many realities such as behavior, beliefs, culture, economic, education, environment, health, income & work, residence, resources, responsibilities, science, social, support & theories.

We know that choosing a mission to lose weight and adopting a healthy lifestyle is often not be enough to get us past the McDonald’s drive thru after a stressful day at work or amidst transporting young kids in the early evening to their many activities.

We Were Never Taught How to Manage Complexity

To achieve a complex challenge, we must manage the uncertainty of complexity, yet we’re not taught that in school. Complexity involves many certain and uncertain elements that interact, and get in the way of our health, relationships, career goals, transforming organizations or finding cancer cures. Yet, we are taught to use certain known elements and formulas to find answers, which doesn’t help with complexity. While proven formulas and calculations may work in school, they fail to address the complexity of achieving what we want or for transforming our lives, businesses and nations.

With complex challenges, achieving success requires managing numerous iterations of the solution rather than finding the solution at the start.

To make progress with complex challenges, it requires:

1. Mission – If the mission isn’t clear, it’s difficult to focus your limited time and resources to achieve it.
2. Impacting Elements – Understanding the many elements that could impact achieving the mission and how these elements will impact the mission and potential solution.
3. Solution Iteration – With complexity, it is virtually impossible to get the solution right without going through numerous iterations. This is due to impacting elements being uncertain and their reactions to the solution being unpredictable.

Managing Complexity Framework Example

Tim Reilly offers us an example of how Google Search manages complexity in his book, WTF: What’s The Future and Why It’s Up to Us. Google Search, the Facebook activity feed and Amazon suggestions are solution interations that are improved every day. Google Search analyzes the “short clicks” versus the “long clicks” continuously to adapt their solution. If users click on the first search result and don’t come back, the were likely satisfied. If users click on the first search result and spend time there (“long click”), and then come back to click on the second result, they were somewhat satisfied. If users click on the first result and quickly come back to click on the second response (“short click”), they were not satisfied. If the user eventually has “long clicks” on the third or fourth search response, after “short clicks” on the top results, the lower ranked results may be more relevant. If this is done by one person, it may be an accident. If it is done by millions of people, the Google Search solution must be adapted.

Google search uses a framework of over 200 signals and an estimated 50,000 subsignals (“impacting elements”). Based on feedback from each solution iteration, they may adjust the search ranking algorithm, the ranking of a subsignal or add additional subsignals.

Our complex challenges don’t require us to build a framework as robust as Google, yet we can learn from Google the power of a clear mission, understanding the impacting elements and continously improving with each solution iteration. The complexity of health, relationships, career goals, transforming organizations or finding cancer cures often requires hundreds or even thousands of solution iterations to find the right answer. Something they didn’t have time to teach in school.