A year-end, a new calendar, or a change of seasons bring fresh starts and times of renewal and reflection. It’s also a time for us to frame the usefulness of our past, our present, and future thinking for making positive change. In this post, we look at our relationship with time, planning, and strategy. New …
Planning is something that is done all the time, but the shape in which these plans unfold is often complex in hidden ways. Without the same resources to evaluate those plans (and make different ones should they change) many organizations are left with great expectations that don’t match the reality of what they do (and can …
At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that.
Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.
A recent fire in Toronto shows some of the flaws with emergency preparedness plans and how they often fail to take in the true complexity of what actually happens, rather they deal only what what could happen in a limited scenario
