How can you best develop your organization, team, and self for complexity and change?

Complexity is determined by the number of factors, the rate of change of those factors, and the ease of identification of the factors in a situation.

Elliott Jaques “Life and Behavior”

While managing complexity and change is close to impossible, being ready to understand and adjust your approach is possible.

When working with organizations, teams, and leaders, how you see the environment and feel plus understand your comfort level with the ambiguity of the decision or discussion (sometimes called VUCA Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), will better prepare you to change your problem-solving efforts.

Trust in Leadership equates to complexity and change readiness

Systems-Drive-Behavior … when you notice that you and your team are stuck, confused, overwhelmed where do you look?

Look at the team and organizational systems. Is the system and process well understood so that it is boring and appears routine. When a system feels boring and routine then people can be creative on top of the system, as opposed to trying to figure out how it works.

Through organization development and design, you can develop an organization and team that has high trust, psychological safety, and can use their environment (existing systems and processes) to increase the opportunities through complexity and change.

Below is a list of what Trust-Attracting and Trust-Repelling organizations look like.

When the ambiguity is high, complexity and change increase, and when the system is bent towards Trust-Attracting, the team works through it and increases trust. When the system is bent toward Trust-Repelling, the team turns apathetic and loses trust.

Complexity and Change Readiness occurs when you can understand the obstacles, create multiple processes to understand known unknown challenges, and shift the odds to produce favorable outcomes through your team.