Why do good ideas fail? Why don’t business strategies achieve their mission? Why doesn’t expert career advice work for us? Why hasn’t proven weight-loss methods delivered our desired weight? Why wasn’t knowledge and hard work enough for success? The surprising answer to these questions is likely the same. It’s our struggle with complexity.
To achieve something meaningful, we must manage the uncertainty of complexity, yet we’re not taught that in school. Complexity involves many interacting certain and uncertain variables, that impact our health, intimate relationships, transforming organizations or finding cancer cures. We are taught in school to use known and predictable variables, logic and formulas to find answers. We learned through literature, history and science how people navigated complex challenges and to identify relevant similarities to infer analogies to help guide us though our challenges.
While these approaches work in school, they often fail miserably when applied to the complexity of transforming our health, careers, businesses and nation.
Complexity – the unpredictability of many impacting variables (known and unknown) operating, reacting and interacting in both certain and uncertain ways.
Scientists, inventors, scholars and system engineers have studied complexity for centuries to make sense out of biology, ecology, economics, politics, psychology, social science, weather and creating new products. They have long known that managing complexity requires complex system frameworks to understand the impacting variables and the use of an iterative process of incremental improvements to be successful.
When faced with the uncertainty of complex decisions, experiments by psychologists Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that we use mental shortcuts, cognitive biases and bypass facts. They found we use logic based on a small subset of the impacting variables while ignoring many important factors. They observed how our decision are influenced by our cognitive biases based on analogies with relevant similarities.
While the logic and analogy thinking we learned in school is effective with most everyday decisions, its effectiveness diminishes with each increase in complexity. It contributes to our struggle with complexity when there are too many variables, unknown variables and unpredictable variables. While logic and analogy thinking has improved our standard of living, it has limits in getting us to the next level in our modern day of expanding complexity. To manage complexity, we can learn from how scientists, inventors, scholars and system engineers do this every day.
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