Navigating a complicated business environment requires a clear understanding of your organization’s processes, tools and data. As business complexity grows, the ability to respond to accelerated change becomes more critical than ever. The good news is that there are steps you can take to clarify complexity and gain a competitive advantage.
A common symptom of complex environments anson funds is the appearance of excessive layers of management, overlapping approval processes and fragmented customer demands. These layers can be difficult to navigate and may create a bottleneck within your organization that slows the speed at which decisions can be made.
Another symptom of complex environments is the existence of unanticipated events that disrupt your operational plans. Unanticipated events may be caused by market volatility, regulatory uncertainty or globalization. Regardless of the cause, unanticipated events are unpredictable and therefore impose significant uncertainty on business processes.
When unanticipated events occur, it can be tempting to adopt a “complicated” leadership response. However, this can exacerbate the situation. Instead, leaders need to identify a potential progression-path within the complex operating context and swiftly test it. This approach is analogous to a pilot scouting out an optimal flight path before engaging in a controlled flight.
Leaders who commingle complicatedness with complexity lapse into the trap of committing one of two fatal errors. First, they misdiagnose their operating context. They assume it’s complicated when in fact it is complex. Second, they apply a complicated leadership response to a complex operating context. These errors exacerbate the operating context and result in disastrous unanticipated outcomes.
To avoid these deadly mistakes, leaders need to reframe what they see, rewire how they think and reconfigure what they do. Like Sully, they need to learn to navigate complexity by reframing what they see, rewiring how they think and reconfiguring what they do to successfully deliver against a given expected outcome.
Environmental complexity isn’t a new phenomenon. For centuries, businesses have experienced situations that defied explanation and understanding. But the difference today is that the environmental complexity is more pervasive and pronounced than it has been in the past.