foreign feel free to interrupt I want to try to save some time at the end for questions but sometimes it's better to do it while we're in the conversation so let's go ahead and get started what I want to do oh let me see I pulled up the wrong deck here sorry one second oh okay I just have the wrong title on it I was fooling with slides today I have a whole bunch of presentations I'm doing and I switched out the the title slide at the last minute so I'm still good this is really about how to enable adaptive space so what we're going to talk about today is complexity leadership and what we do when we're leading in complexity and the requirement that when we're in it we need to adapt so my focus in my research and my work has been on how to enable people and organizations for adaptability through a leadership lens um I said that people now know what complexity is I don't think anybody has a question about that there's so many things happening right now and complexity I usually do a slide of different kinds of Trends or complexity events but I just put up a general one I'll tell you the one that I'm most interested in at the moment is really what's happening around leadership of people in organizations so if you're following the story of Elon Musk at Twitter and the way that he's leading at Twitter the kinds of things that are happening there there I think that it has incredible ramifications and we're seeing in the news right now all of the efforts and the announcements that companies are making of bringing people back to work there's been a constant tension between the people who want to stay at home and the companies that feel they need to bring them back to work they were waiting for the right time to do this and now they're starting to make announcements I'm not sure it's going to work very well and then I'm just going to give a quick other story I have kids in their 20s and they've been dealing with a lot of issues around layoffs or companies that um that are in the process of of being acquired in Acquisitions and companies are made are doing layoffs now in ways they never have before so they're just letting people go they're not letting them back in the office they're not giving notice it's a pretty harsh way of managing um in response to all the things that are going on and I think that's going to backfire so all of these dynamics that are happening create tensions and in those tensions they they end up looking like this picture you think you're going to drive one Behavior but you end up driving another Behavior do you think you lead or prepare or plan for something and then before you know it something else happens or you try to lead with control like we did in the past and you find that you don't really have control and then in the current moment workers still tend to have some control but who knows when and how that's going to switch again it will switch so in complexity we need to lead differently and what we need to understand and I think we all know this by now is that old models of leadership were managerial and they were focused on top down but now what we need is new models of leadership that are more collaborative and the big change that I want to suggest to you all today is to think about leadership not as a manager subordinate relationship or a hierarchical relation but instead as a co-creation so all of the work that I do is building on the idea of relational leadership that leadership is a relational dynamic or a relational interaction and it occurs in relation so if I'm trying to lead or if I'm in a follower role or trying to be a good follower I'm leading in relation to my leader or my follower or I am and I'm also doing it in relation to context so lots of things going on with this view of leadership as a co-creation and the need to consider how we generate more collaborate Nation so in complexity it requires that we enable an Adaptive response this is the law of requisite complexity that was built on the law of requisite variety Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety and essentially what it says that when we're in complexity it takes complexity to beat complexity so there are three zones that we talk about um in complexity there's the chaos Zone the complexities on in the order zone so the top one is chaos and in chaos we know that what happens is people feel like there's no pattern there's no connection there's no making sense of anything that's going on around you so here we see dots that are not connected no pattern nothing nothing rational or explicable in the situation that we're in but what happens is you'll be married just to this might be I'm interested in this question but Kim posed you know our Wicked problems still prefer uh content to describe the complex adaptive systems like uh where do uh Wicked problems live in this spectrum from complexity I'm assuming somewhere between complexity and Chaos or on that border but what are your thoughts on I think Wicked problems are complexity and I think people use the term Wicked because they don't have the complexity language or understanding but essentially these Wicked problems are big ones that we don't know how to solve and that have huge interactive elements to them so essentially their complexity now I don't think they're chaos because if we can Define the problem then it's probably not chaos we have we know enough to know that there's a pattern or a question to ask in the problem or just okay so in in the case of wicked problems or in the case of complexity let's talk about complexity when it's happening when a complexity event occurs it pushes people out of equilibrium so it takes them out of their order it takes them out of what they know of their their path that they're on and it shoots them into something else and in extreme cases of complexity it can feel like chaos so what people do is when they experience it it as chaos they drought it down to order and this is what we call the order response so the problem of the order response is that it focuses on stability and typically what it tries to do is drive back to an old order so people who are putting complexity or put on taken off their path they want to go back on it so they say no no it hasn't changed things are the same we're just going to keep operating the way that we were operating before the and that's a pullback to equilibrium so what complexity is doing is pulling you out of equilibrium and systems naturally pull back to equilibrium if the problem is if we need complexity and we go to the order response we end up in stagnation and in extreme cases death we know this now from covid again I mentioned covet at the beginning covet was an extreme complexity example and in an extreme complex which really is done a system or a person will die so stagnation is death if you don't change you die it's that simple it's that scary what we need instead is an Adaptive response so this is what the work that we've been doing for the last couple decades and really trying to understand what this looks like so I want to ask you to just think for yourself for a moment and I don't need answers I just want you to think about it if you have to fill this box in and you have to say what is an Adaptive response in your own heads what would that look like so that's the question I want to pose and give you a second to think about that so I think we know what a chaos response is chaos is when there's no pattern that people are have no idea what to do Running Scared no no real viable response and Order response is one that goes to the traditional order the systems that we know so what is an Adaptive response well that's really the question that we've been asking in our work so the chaos response is the dots no pattern the order response looks more like the hierarchical managerial kind of approach that we're used to the Adaptive response is this so I draw this picture in and I ask groups quite often if they know what this is a picture of and I'm surprised how many people don't know that this kind of a diagram I mean we see the one below is called an org chart right so what would this be called are there any answers in the the chat box Milton um knowledge about Networks so you guys are good I asked so many people they don't know they never come up with network and it's really a network map so it doesn't surprise me you're a complexity group that you would know what this is I just want to make you aware a lot of people are not aware that this is a network minute so essentially what it's saying is that if we're going to have an Adaptive response what we need is a networked solution networked meaning networked interactions or Dynamics all right so we're going to keep that in mind as we go through then and talk about what the Adaptive process is as we were doing the work this became clear to me um in a paper that I wrote in 2018 where the Adaptive process really started to emerge and surface we had seen it but we didn't know exactly what we were seeing so in the Adaptive process we have two systems we have an entrepreneurial system and an operational system and when we're in complexity or when we're in an Adaptive situation these two things go into tension so an entrepreneurial is pushing for novelty for new ideas operational is pushing for stability efficiency productivity results they go into tension and quite often what happens is the traditional leadership training tells us that in tension that's a bad thing people don't like it so it's not only the leaders who don't like it it's the people in the system the followers the subordinates who don't the employees who don't want the tension so what they do is leaders step in and get rid of the tension the beautiful work that was done on this was the early work by Heifetz where he emphasized the importance of tension in adaptive leadership so anybody who knows that understands this Dynamic so we started seeing this in the hospitals that we were studying around 2007 and eight when we had a grant from Booz Allen Hamilton to study leadership and adaptability in the healthcare industry and what we saw was Healthcare was clearly in complexity in the U.S they were having to drive a lot of change and some systems were responding to that with this response they were fighting it they were getting rid of tension and they were trying to go back to Old order so what we need instead of an adapt of an order response is an Adaptive response so here I'm going to just take that entrepreneurial and operational and make it a need to innovate in a need to produce so pressure's coming on the system they require they present an Adaptive challenge where we have to have an Adaptive solution a solution a problem for which there's no known solution we need to innovate and create we have to do something different to survive so that automatically kicks in ideation automatically everybody does this this is not something that's the hard part we have the need to innovate the the ideation process that occurs but it clashes up against the need to produce so what we've done is we've renamed this from tension because people weren't understanding tension before complexity we've renamed it conflicting essentially what it looks like is ideas bashing up against each other in some literatures they refer to this as creative abrasion so conflicting is heterogeneous ideas me needs worldviews perspectives bumping up against each other in conflict or intention and it's necessary so for us to be able to generate an Adaptive response we have to engage this the one core finding in the early work that really stood out to me and has stood out to me for everything we've done is the importance of what we call the tension Dynamic underlying complexity that we need to engage the tension to be able to generate or drive adaptability so that's what this is getting at conflicting but here's the thing that became that surfaced in the later part of the 2010s the last decade where we really started to understand that the key to this is not just the conflicting but the second piece that goes along with it which is connecting so we only get adaptability if we're able to find connections amidst the conflicting so this is in today's world we see it everybody's conflicting right we because of social media everybody has a voice we've got all of these groups of course they find their um the echo chambers that they operate in they connect there but we can't seem to be able to connect across the conflicting we see it with our politicians we see it with leaders we see it all over the place so my premise is that the number one challenge in for leadership today is how to get this connecting how do we get connecting amidst conflicting all right when we do that when we engage this Dynamic properly it's adaptive space so adaptive space is the conditions that allow this adaptive process that generates an Adaptive outcome to occur and it's really this this whole picture here so what adaptive space does is is it creates the conditions for pressures to to generate the conflicting the tension Dynamic activate the tension Dynamic but then combine it with connecting so that people are able to find connections that generate some insight or some novelty or some learning or some adaptive solution that can then be put into the system in the form of adaptability all right so this is the basic adaptive process and I'm going to pause are there any questions coming up here uh there was one regarding the reference um to the book that you mentioned oh it was on high fits so Ronald Heifetz at Harvard did a lot of work on adaptive leadership I think his first book was um leadership without easy answers and then he also had a book on adaptive leadership he really discussed this when I used to use a Harvard Business review article that he wrote with Marty Linsky and it talked about um followers what come what Comfort but what they need is tension so it's the idea of how do you cook the conflict he also got the idea of being on the dance floor and on the balcony zooming in and out kind of idea really beneficial kinds of skills for understanding how to engage in complexity okay so if you get this basic process this is the core fundamental simple Dynamic of complexity and it crosses everything so it's fractal this same Dynamic occurs across levels so it occurs in our head it occurs between two people it occurs in groups it occurs in organizations it occurs in society this adaptive process of engaging the tension between the need to innovate and the need to produce in adaptive space to generate adaptive outcomes is the core Dynamic we need to understand to lead in complexity the fascinating fascinating thing about this is that we discovered this in our complexity leadership work but then Benjamin Lichtenstein um I wonder if I have his book here I usually show it oh I don't have it on my desk right now he wrote a book on generative emergence and he did it he did a whole review if you're interested in complexity Benjamin lichtenstein's book on generative emergence is the best you can find um for for this from this standpoint he reviewed all of the complexity theories from science and brought it in and then determined that dissipative structures Theory from prigine was the best for understanding what's going on and when we take his and mine my work and that what we've discovered in all of our qual work from the mid-2000s they map on perfectly so I wrote a paper in 2021 and journal of change management you can look that one up it's called change leadership for a changed world where I show the mapping of his and our work and that this process that we're describing here really is a generative emergence process all right so what we're going to do now is we're going to take the same Dynamic of the Adaptive process which is a General Dynamic and again it can occur in my head so the example in my head is I need to I want to do complexity work because I see that the world is changing and I see that the leadership work that I'm doing isn't relevant to what people need so I start to innovate let's go back to this for a second I start to innovate I feel pressure around it because I know that what's happening out in the world isn't right but I have the need to produce it's pushed up against the need to produce because in my field I'm required to publish that's where we get our our rewards and our recognition so I have to publish that's my need to produce and in the Publications they view the world in the old way so I have this tension Dynamic and I have to engage that in adaptive space now it could be that the need to produce wipes it out and I say forget it this is too hard I'm not going to do it I stay in my old world but I decide that I want to continue to push for adaptive ability so I engage the Adaptive space of conflicting and connecting to figure out how I can maneuver this and make it through and the way that I did that was I had parallel paths I would take some of the new work I was doing and I would do the complexity work but I had the old work where I'm pushing the edge of the old Paradigm all right so that's the Adaptive outcome that's the Adaptive process that can occur in a person's head in terms of how they're deciding how to do it or it can occur at the organizational level so now we'll look at the organizational level and we'll see that pressure's come in oh we see the network map so here again the first thing we have to do is we have to reframe our thinking about organizations away from rigid hierarchical org charts to Networks so we start with viewing an organization as a network then we say pressures come in and when the pressures come in they pressure a local part of the system this is what makes it so hard in organizations is people want to drive change but everybody's experiencing something different in their own local so what I'm trying to drive in my local in my area isn't going to fit what somebody else is trying to drive in their local area and therefore it's difficult to connect okay so the pressure is coming on the local in our early work we were interested in the in ideation we quickly dropped that because what we found was when the pressures come in systems automatically start this process the entrepreneurial system is there it pushes for learning Innovation novelty growth people have ideas ideas are cheap that's not the problem so they start to ideate on the local level and they'll do a process called Collective creativity where they generate the idea and then they start to circulate it with other people once they get an idea and they've tested it and it's working in the local they try to drive it out into the organization more broadly and this is where the problems really occur in many organizations they don't have adaptive space and if you don't have adaptive space you don't have the conditions for that adaptation to occur for the conflicting and connecting process so ideas get shut down it's a brick wall it's a Wall of Resistance whatever you want to call it frozen middle there are all kinds of terms for this bureaucracy but essentially it gets shut down so for this to work in an organization the key thing they need to have is adaptive space that allows the the adaptability to occur all right so ideas will start to go out and then if they can make it across adaptive space if they can Engage The conflicting and connecting to get more for new order to happen it has to be formalized and incorporated into the operational system there's a huge process here nice is there a question maybe I have a question here like would adaptive space equal to like loosening up uh corporate policies like for instance if we have rigid policies uh in organization [Music] um would that limit that adaptive space and therefore kind of loosen up the guardrails to you know allow for that emergence and adaptive space is that kind of what you're referring to absolutely so sorry I have a cold to my throat and you can kind of hear it in my voice so what happened with kovid was because it was a complexity event it naturally opened up adaptive space which is what complexity does but that was such an extreme adaptive space that people had no choice right so if you think about what happened in covid all rules went out the window people didn't think that you could work from home they didn't think that remote would work they didn't think a lot of things that they were doing doctors I worked with health care they didn't think that you could could treat a patient without putting a hand on them they were really adamant about that for many years that you had to have the the physical body in front of you to be able to treat a patient kova changed all of that so it naturally opened a window of adaptive space that loosened the systems for Change and now what we're seeing is that adaptive space is shutting back down so now we're getting back rigid rules yes or would you also say that it was not adopted in the sense like where everybody just applied like lockdowns and lockdowns were not necessarily adapted space so here's the really fascinating thing and I didn't know this before covid people were asking me questions they said well how come in the early responses the authoritarian governments had the best response it's an interesting question right they were the best at making sure that when things started everybody was operating in a way that they were saving lives so what we discovered is that in the kind of response you can have an Adaptive response it can come more on the entrepreneurial side or more on the operational side so it doesn't mean it's always the Innovative thing it could be that you're going more to an operational response that's helping Drive adaptability in the system too so I think lockdowns were the right thing to do I don't think they were maladaptive I think they were incredibly adaptive and people really kind of lose focus of what they were for they were really to protect our Health Care Systems but in addition people didn't want to die I mean that's the reality of it people went on their own and locked themselves in their houses in the U.S we didn't have a tree lockdown in the U.S my daughter lives in England they had true lockdowns there they were not allowed to leave their flat for months so I mean we think that that lockdowns in the U.S were bad but that was a lot of that was self-imposed by people as well so I think that the idea of adaptive space is we need to create organizations that recognize that when there's a complexity event happening when their pressures on the system they allow the system the space to be able to adapt and they do that by engaging the conflicting and connecting thank you for explaining that okay so now with this we have new kinds of leadership so we're going to map leadership onto this and we're going to say that there are different kinds of leadership we need to think about today that we didn't think about in the past so one is entrepreneurial leadership and this is a lot of people think this is starting your own business yes but there's also entrepreneurial leadership that happens inside the organization so we need to recognize those people who can do this who can engage the new ideas who can advance and innovate and the good news here is a lot of people don't know how to do this so a lot of people are like well I'm not going to do it you don't need to have everybody doing entrepreneurial that's the best news you just need enough entrepreneurial thinkers that they can generate the ideas what you really need is the enabling leadership so this is the biggest change we see is that we've got to create new training and development programs that help to Foster enabling leadership and in enabling leadership is leadership that creates the conditions of adaptive space so it sets up those opportunities for the system to be loosened up to accept change it doesn't stay there all the time it's just when a complexity event occurs and you need to try to to inject the the um the novelty and that's why we call it space it's not a system it's there when you need the space it's completely fluid and dynamic and then there's a third one which is operational leadership we've always had this but what's different about operational and the complexity Dynamic is that what it does is it helps to accommodate adaptation so most operational leadership is rigid and it's has a bias to know to say no the bias to know um they say anytime you come with an idea we can't do that it's not going to work we've tried that before too big of a an issue we can't make those changes etc etc so this is really the case of rigid infrastructure and so what operational leadership needs to do is help be the end that helps tip the adaptability into the operational system to generate New Order so I'll briefly describe each of those entrepreneurial as individuals and groups who act as Leaders regardless of title to Advanced novelty leading to beneficial change these are people who think outside the box again entrepreneur Royal kind of thinking then we have enabling leadership and these people are usually in positions of formal Authority and what they do is they enable and protect adaptive space so I like the the pictures below the left side is the left side of the model where there's the overlap between the enabling and the entrepreneurial so what they need to do there is help nurture and protect ideation the ideation process many leaders make mistakes because they jump in on this process and they influence it and they try to drive it when they should leave it to the local group to to plan the pressures locally and come up with the best solution so one element of this is that left side of the model on ideation the other is really the emergence picture so this picture that's this topsy-turvy emergence arrow with all of the different directions and non-linearity and dead ends and all of the things that you run into in emergence but then leading into tipping it into the operational system them and then the operational leadership whose role is to realign and loosen up the operational system so that it can accommodate New Order so this is really taking all that messiness and trying to get it into something that's going to work all right so I'm going to run through some more things than I want to end with some mindsets so a few more things here the problem of bureaucracy this used to be a really relevant slide and I will tell you it's become less relevant and that's because bureaucracy has been cut out of organizations so we that is an Adaptive process in and of itself that organizations recognize the problem of this and they've continued to cut it so now really what we talk about is the challenges of the brick wall and the brick wall is the problem that you run into when you're trying to advance ideas out and they get stifled or stopped the big thing that I do in working with people here is get them to understand that when you're driving ideas out from the entrepreneurial system and you're trying to take it more broadly you're trying to scale it or Champion it you are naturally going to hit conflicting it's absolutely going to happen you'll get pushback and that's part of the Adaptive process too the problem occurs when people take that pushback as a no when they think that they've been stopped so it takes a mindset of saying I get that this is going to hit and I'm going to go at the conflicting and I'm not going to go saying give me a yes or no answer because if I get no it stopped instead I'm going to go in I'm going to say what do you think of this idea or what kinds of problems are you experiencing it's really the importance of questions to find out where they are so that you can link up what you're trying to do with what their need is it's about linking up and connecting and then when you get the pushback it's about taking it and saying okay I'm going to use this as information to figure out what I'm not understanding about what's going on and what I need how I need to refine my idea so it's an ongoing process of refinement in fact what they say is that and I don't have that slide in here what they say is the idea starts on the left it gets changed in the middle and by the time it gets implemented on the right hand side of this it's different from what you ever thought it would look like so don't fall on love with your idea fall in love with what you're trying to accomplish in terms of helping the organization change and adapt all right so here are the mindsets there are four complexity mindsets that I just want to introduce to you and mention there are a lot on the slides here um but I I want you to just think about it more broadly so these mindsets are what's what are required to function effectively in complexity the first one is adaptive mindset and what it does is it helps you get the gene get change agility so when complexity is happening you can go more quickly through it you don't go into the valley of Despair you don't fall off you aren't destroyed by it you can actually function within it and get across to your desired State more smoothly so we're going to come contrast the Adaptive mindset within order mindset I don't know I don't think that these are mutually exclusive so I think that you can have some elements of both what I do believe very strongly and what I think I know is that you have to have some elements of the Adaptive mindset to make it in complexity so here's the order mindset the world can be managed if only we do a good enough job of forecasting planning and decision making people with an order mindset believe that if we ignore change it will go away and we can stay as we are surprises are bad they want certainty and predictability and they prefer tradition and Status Quo the Adaptive mindset believes that change is a natural part of the world and given that you all are attending a complexity conference my guess is that most of you have some belief of this instead of fighting change we should accept it change is energizing engaging and rewarding and people who are really extreme at this are tend to be more sensation seeking so they can get bored by repetition and routine all right so how do you develop an Adaptive mindset you develop adaptability skills such as creative problem solving but the other one is acceptance and I think acceptance is really a key piece of this the problem with the order response is that people want to fight it they don't want to believe it um so in the Adaptive response we have to accept Okay it's different I liked the old world I like things the way they were I liked my life but I have to accept life as it is and not as I wish it to be so acceptance is really a critical and key part first stage of this and then build resilience so resilience is the ability to recover from adversity and to move through difficult situations so we've been hearing a lot about resilience all you have to do is look it up you'll see plenty on that it's learning to roll with the punches and I think a really critical thing here is reframing distress to you stress so I said earlier that the problem with the chaos responses we drive to order and what I will tell you is now what I know is that's okay if it's going to take you out of distress if you're in distress and you need to go to order that's fine the problem is you can't stay there you've got to then jump back up into complexity into that zone and you would really want to try to turn it into eustress which is that positive stress that helps you ideate and innovate you want to continually update your skills you want to get comfortable with risk taking if your risk averse and the easy way to do that is through small steps just take small risks and get yourself more used to that on a micro level and then if you do enough micro it'll start to build up for you and then practice complexity leadership and stay in the complexity Zone rather than the orders and in response to complexity all right second one is collaboration mindset and I'm going to go through these really quickly this contrasts with the hierarchical mindset so the hierarchical believes that leadership is a hierarchical relation and it's an authority relation hierarchy is the most efficient and appropriate way to get things done leaders should hold higher status and Authority so they should be the ones making decisions the leader's role is to be the expert and guide actions and the followers role is to implement directives in obey Authority now we're going to contrast that with what I started with the collaboration mindset which is really about co-creation so that it believes that leadership is a collective action it's only created it only happens in the co-creations When leaders and followers or leading and following combine to generate co-produced leadership in its outcomes so the collaboration mindset believes that collaboration is the way to get things done now that's not every case clearly people with a collaboration mindset know there's there are times when you need to do it different differently but they have a bias toward using collaboration to get things done the best collaborations come when people switch around leading and following so if I'm the leader the role or position of a leader and somebody else is the follower they have the identity role or position of a follower what I would do if I have a collaboration mindset is I would be willing to follow my follower when they have good ideas so that's really the key to collaboration and the leader should follow others when they have good ideas also this really brings to prominence the idea of followership which has been ignored and overlooked in leadership research that followership is about how how followers partner with leaders to get things done and that's stepping in and stepping out as needed to to drive outcomes the emergence mindset is in contrast to the reductionist mindset and the reductionist mindset is really the scientific way of looking at the world the scientific method so it sees it as an assemblage of Parts knowing the parts we can understand the whole linear cause effect and then restrict themselves to functional or siled views so that's basic scientific method um the emergence mindset is systems thinker so things in one part of the system can unexpectedly affect other parts so what emergence mindset people do is they zoom in and they zoom out they look for patterns they look for trends that could link up and generate emergence they understand complexity and understand that when complexity is happening that they are in it and remember complexity is not happening all the time so this means that it's really about understanding when it is happening they expect and engage with unexpected consequences their boundary spanners they're often interdisciplinary thinkers and they plan the pressures as I mentioned the importance of that earlier they don't try to get rid of tension they use the tension to drive the adaptability and The Innovation and they drop seeds of emergence so they look for things that can be linked up that if they were to link up they could potentially Drive something bigger and that's kind of the classic thing that entrepreneurs do and when they're doing opportunity recognition and driving entrepreneurial kinds of outcomes all right and then the final one is kind of squishy I just throw it in here because I know it's important it's the idea of outcomes that in the belief that if you can't measure you can't manage it but the reality is that when it comes to complexity and especially adaptability there are a lot of things that can't be easily measured and we haven't known how to measure them so they're getting missed so the biggest problem I've seen in my work and when I talk with people is that they don't have good outcomes set up to drive adaptability we know that that outcomes can have unintended consequences um this is just you know that we're going to let the students evaluate you so on the right the student says well okay fine it's simple if you do my homework for me you get a five otherwise you get a one the student's saying that to the teacher so an example of an unintended consequence when we try to drive behavior and we get something that we didn't hope for and then finally outcomes recognize the importance of how they're measured consider the extent to which they drive unintended consequences and the real Clincher here is we need measures that drive adaptability and Agility so yes we still need efficiency we still need short-term performance but really critical is people need to start looking at their their reward system their incentive system and see if they are doing things that are helping to drive adaptability and Agility all right final slides questions to consider do I have the mindset to lead in complexity what can I do to better enable the mindsets in myself and in the others around me and what's the number one thing I need to do to lead differently so I think that that's a question that I use with my groups when I'm working with them and we have a conversation about that all right we're in complexity it happens when emergent we see emergence we need to be adaptive we do that by enabling adaptive space and we have the four mindsets Okay so we've got a few minutes for questions I sped it up a little bit there at the end hope that's okay are there I'm gonna um actually switch off of this is it is it okay if I go out of SlideShare so I can see people oh absolutely yeah um there are a couple of questions here David uh head first one here uh does entrepreneurial system have a bias towards solving slash reacting to surface problems putting out fires rather than addressing changing the structure slash rules that lead that led to fires in the first place oh and that could very well be destroyed Public Health Care System yeah I think that very well could be and I think the issue is that the entrepreneurial people are operating in their local and they often don't see the bigger picture so they're not often thinking from the system the broad system level especially in healthcare um so I think there's some entrepreneurial thinkers who are pretty good at this and they actually can do this appropriately but um if we know the fact of the local but also a lot of people who are entrepreneurial really get excited by the ideas and so like in r d they'll drive a lot of really beautiful design but not think so much about how I can get done so there are all kinds of things that can happen there okay uh going up a little bit the question that I missed by Pavel um I think in the context I think he was saying like is it key for adaptability enablement to move from hierarchy to holocracy or some similar I'm assuming Network um yeah so this isability require yes well let's take let's not use the word hierarchy because we're always going to have some hierarchy that's why I said we're going to have some of these mindsets that that they're not mutually exclusive there's always going to be some hierarchy the problem is bureaucracy so it's when when bureaucracy sets up systems that they're siled they're rigid they're not able to accommodate change they have no flex in them they have no agility that's the real problem so I think that um holocracy is one example of how to do this and it works for some people but I think almost every organization now with the exception of maybe the government I think every organization now has more agility in it than it's ever had before so this process is occurring and it's occurring because we're in a complex world and they have no choice so organizations are much better at it some better than others okay uh Christian I don't know if you want to go off mute and ask but he asked if you could go to the problem uh side of the problem of the order response yes okay so the order response yep I will do that and you can go ahead I I just wanted to uh just touch on the point that um having the the right radar for appreciating when this the rigid systems and if quote-unquote bureaucracies I not in the sense of bureaucracy but when the system rigidity is Justified foreign yes um that's right now that's different from an order response in my opinion so I you have to it it's really an issue of clarity for me to make sure I'm really clear in order response is when they're rejecting that the change has happened they're in denial um they're trying to take it back to an old outdated order so and and that's a little bit confusing from actually jumping to this other order response in this picture here which is the hierarchical response right so there are some times that we need to have some what looks like a hierarchical response but what I will tell you is I think it's an Adaptive response in the operational space does that make sense to you Christian yeah he does but if you go uh back a few more slides there were some points where you had um the problem with the actual response yeah right there the problem with uh with the order response but the one with the brown box oh this one yeah that one okay so yes there we go right like the the my my the key word for me here is equilibrium there is so I guess now I understand because you were talking about equilibrium the old equilibrium is probably not the appropriate one but there is an equilibrium that will that is Justified at certain circumstances yes so Christian this is a really great question and again it it's nuanced in complexity Theory they talk about this as values and fitness Peaks right so if you know complexity the language of complexity is you can end up in a valley and then you can't get to the peak and so what happens is as complexity is trying to pull you up to a fitness Peak meaning you'll be better off there you slide back down into the valley and that's really what this pullback to equilibrium is it's pulling back to the old equilibrium so in complexity with covid um we were pulled we were all forced into a new world it is a different world it's not the same world and yet we had people like I'll just say the president of our country who was saying I'll just ignore it it's going to go away or jair bolsonaro who was saying it's going to magically disappear or in England um the leader there was saying that we're just going to like get hurt immunity those are all kinds of things that are are really more of a or response that's a denial so I agree with you I think that what you're trying what you're saying is more related to this that sometimes what you need is when you're it's too chaotic you do need to go to some order you do need to have some stability and you can't drive a system crazy or you know out of control you've got to have some element of stability in there while you're still adapting along the way thank you so much okay thank you that was a great question yeah we got like four or five other questions um and we don't have enough time we have one minute uh so um if you have time I can stay five more minutes and try to answer them sure um so let's see here um let me see if I um let's just I don't know if this is the last one but let's uh if someone were in the business of innovation and actively won an ongoing complexity all the time then how would they sustain an Adaptive space over the long term this is from Clark Stacy um that's a little harder for me to answer here's here's what I'll tell you um I think that a lot of people and some people I've worked with have been really enamored with Innovation and they try to push Innovation all the time and I get that but I did work with a company and I worked I was called in it was a multinational company but I was dealing with the US the president group the executive team and they the president was in that room was kept saying Innovation Innovation Innovation so then I went into the the room and I said okay I'm just gonna ask a question how many of you in here would consider yourself really really great at Innovation you're highly innovative and out of 13 people guess how many hands went up three and the three that went up were the two r d people and the HR guy who had invited me in the first place the president who was preaching innovation did not say he was Innovative so I think this word Innovation can be a little bit problematic I don't really think what we want is innovation for everybody but we want is adaptability so I changed the question and I said okay how many of you consider yourself highly adaptive how many how many hands do you think went up 13. everybody in the room so what we want is adapt adaptation and adaptability only certain people can innovate so let the innovators innovate protect them let them do what they can that's the enabling role Foster it but don't have that impose on the rest of the organization because it will end up stifling your innovation in the long term because people don't like it so you want the interview innovators going but you want them to be able to slide the ideas in when it's the right timing when the Adaptive space is there or you need to create the the anticipated adaptive space you need to be proactive in how you do this I hope that answered the question and the other thing I'll tell you is complexity is draining so it will burn people out so if people are in it too much or too constantly they will burn out so you need to find ways to protect them from that too foreign [Music]