Complexity Anti-Patterns

In this blog, I want to offer an overview of the themes distilled from different literature that can be considered anti-patterns when we deal with complexity. This is intended as part one of a two-blog series. In the second one, I will share how the work of Carl Rogers provides insights on how to deal with a big chunk of these obstacles.

Complexity: What Is It?

Complexity thinking gets more and more traction in the organizational and leadership development contexts. More and more scholars realize that the mechanical metaphor of organization has unsolvable inherent limitations and a different perspective can provide more empowering approaches to dealing with the challenges people in organizations face.

To describe what do I mean by complexity I will quote Sidney Dekker from Drift Into Failure:

Systems with only a few components and few interdependencies are not going to generate complexity. Complexity means that a huge number of interacting and diverse parts give rise to outcomes that are really hard, if not impossible, to foresee. The parts are connected, interacting, diverse, and together they generate adaptive behavior in interaction with their environment. It is their interdependencies and interactions that is responsible for their ability to produce adaptation. Complex systems pulse with life. The way in which components are interlinked, related and cross-adaptive, or interactive despite and because their diversity, can give rise to novelty, to large events. These effects that are typically emergent, that is, they are impossible to locate back in the properties or micro-level behavior of any one of the components.

When we deal with complexity we need different ways of interacting with, thinking of, and sensing complex systems. And we also need to be able to use our broader cognitive capacities. Analysis where one breaks down the system into smaller parts to find which part is the cause of the problem won’t do. In complexity ’cause’ is elusive, emergent, and/or relational. As an example, you don’t fix team performance the same way you fix a car engine.

The Obstacles to Dealing With Complexity

When it comes to the complexity several anti-patterns prevent us from accessing more expansive perspectives and broader sets of available data. Most of them are of cognitive quality, though one can be considered behavioral more cognitive.

Here are some of the most common of complexity anti-patterns:

1. Premature closure – making a conclusion, finding an answer to a question or solution to a problem too soon. When we know what it is we stop looking and reflecting. Often the urge for premature closure comes from fear or discomfort of being with ambiguous and uncertain. Here’s how Guy Claxton describes it in his insightful Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind:

Recent scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill-defined. Deliberate thinking, d- mode, works well when the problem it is facing is easily conceptualised.

As Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe write in Managing the Unexpected:

Nonobvious breakdowns happen all the time… we tend to settle for the “first explanation” that makes us feel in control. That explanation turns the unknown into the known, which makes the explanation appear to be “true.” That can be a serious misjudgment.

2. One specific and very common form of closure is labeling. When we label something we make it similar to something we already know. And behind the similarities with a previous event or familiar concept may crawl a dangerous and crucial dissimilarity. Here’s Weick and Sutcliffe:

the danger of general labels, such as catastrophic attack, a simple operation, familiar ski slope, operator error, or familiar sequences. When observers impose general labels such as these, they may neglect specific signs that the unexpected is evolving.

Here Sidney Dekker describes the danger of labels:

airworthiness is an artificially binary black-or-white verdict (a jet is either airworthy or it is not) that gets imposed on a very grey, vague, uncertain world – a world where the effects of releasing a new technology into actual operational life are surprisingly unpredictable and incalculable. Dichotomous, hard yes or no meets squishy reality and never quite gets a genuine grip.

Here’s Guy Claxton on how articulating a label can make us stop looking out there and rather rely on the label

Having articulated a misleading account, people then proceed to use this faulty map to guide their further interactions with the task, rather than relying on the ability of trial and error, ‘messing about’, to deliver the knowledge they need. Attention gets diverted from watching how the system actually behaves  to trying to figure out what is going on, and using these putative explanations as the basis for action.

3. Narrow focus – when our gaze is drawn to a limited subset of data or phenomena we lose touch with the richer texture of reality. Often that manifests in looking into parts, not the relationships.

As Sidney Dekker puts it

System thinking is about relationships, not parts. System thinking is about the complexity of the whole, not the simplicity of carved-out bits. Systems thinking is about non-linearity and dynamics, not about linear cause-effect-cause sequences. Systems thinking is about accidents that are more than the sum of the broken parts. It is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.

Margaret Wheatley in Leadership and the New Science writes:

When we study the individual parts or try to understand the system through discrete quantities, we get lost. Deep inside the details, we cannot see the whole. Yet to understand and work with the system, we need to be able to observe it as a system, in its wholeness. Wholeness is revealed only as shapes, not facts. Systems reveal themselves as patterns, not as isolated incidents or data points

And here’s Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary:

In humans, just as in animals and birds, it turns out that each hemisphere attends to the world in a different way – and the ways are consistent. The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.

4. Filtering data which may include ignoring, discarding, or distorting – when data or observations don’t fit our preconceived notions or make us uncomfortable it can be filtered out. Sometimes this process happens so quickly that it’s not even consciously registered.

Weick and Sutcliffe write:

Success narrows perceptions, changes attitudes, reinforces a single way of doing things, breeds overconfidence in current practices, and reduces acceptance of opposing points of view. The problem is that if people assume that success demonstrates competence, they are more likely to drift into complacency and inattention.

5. Linear, binary logic, black-and-white thinking. Complexity often requires paradoxical thinking that allows processing seemingly contradictory propositions and observation of multiple, emergent, ill-defined causation threads.

H.S. Jennings writes in The Biological Basis of Human Nature:

The fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes… search for “the” cause of this or that phenomenon; the investigator is not content till he has found “it.”… The fallacy of concluding that because one factor plays a role, another does not… It does not follow that because one cause has been found, others can be left out of account; yet that practice is astonishingly general. It is rather commonly safe to accept the positive assertions of an investigator, as to factors that are at work; one can almost as safely throw quietly overboard his negative conclusions, as to other factors that are not at work.

Werner Erhard in Speaking Being emphasizes how the structure of language can override complex phenomena with a simple binary linguistic structure:

Problems are created by buts, because “but” means what follows it—this is the logic of linguistics here, okay—what follows “but” negates what precedes it, like an equal and opposite force to it. “I want to go to the beach” is stopped by the equal and opposite force “I don’t have enough time,” because of “but.”

6. Emotions held about opinions. There is defensiveness where we feel right and that we need to protect from what is perceived as wrong and as an attack. And there is righteousness where we feel right and where we feel the urge to attack what we perceive as dangerously wrong. Both contribute to the distortion of data and close our minds to opposing views and interpretations.

Jack Gibb writes in his amazing article about defensive communication:

The person who behaves defensively, even though he or she also gives some attention to the common task, devotes an appreciable portion of energy to defending himself or herself. Besides talking about the topic, he thinks about how he appears to others, how he may be seen more favorably, how he may win, dominate, impress or escape punishment, and/or how he may avoid or mitigate a perceived attack.

and also:

Defense arousal prevents the listener from concentrating upon the message. Not only do defensive communicators send off multiple value, motive and affect cues, but also defensive recipients distort what they receive. As a person becomes more and more defensive, he or she becomes less and less able to perceive accurately the motives, the values and the emotions of the sender.

A specific case of that is when people try to keep face and pretend to be in control. Here’s Nick Obolensky describing it in his Complex Adaptive Leadership:

Complexity looks messy, and control seems absent. The typical response to a dynamic and complex situation is for leaders to ‘get a grip’ and try to exert more control – but that is not what should be done! Such an effort, more often than not, results in waste and the opposite effect to what is desired. An understanding of how chaos and complexity ‘works’ can help ameliorate such concerns, and it is to this subject that part two is dedicated.

7. Separation and static thinking. Trying to stay objectively distant from the system and grasp it from the outside. Overthinking. Overanalysing. The problem with this approach is that some data becomes available only once we step into and start interacting with the system, experiencing and learning from our interactions. Here’s Margareth Wheatley:

In order to change, the system needs to learn more about itself from itself. The system needs processes to bring it together. Many different processes will work, whatever facilitates self-discovery and creates new relationships simultaneously. The whole system eventually must be involved in doing this work; it can’t be done by outside experts or small teams.

Weick and Sutcliffe write that:

interdependencies and concepts are joined when people do something. When you do something, you change both yourself and the context around you. You may realize this. You may not. The depth of this realization is what we mean by sensitivity. Sensitivity involves a mix of awareness, alertness, and action that unfolds in real time and that is anchored in the present.

Famous social scientist Kurt Lewin emphasized action as part of research “No action without research; no research without action.”

Iain McGilchrist talks about how different ways of being allow one to access different ways of perceiving and knowing:

there were two ways of being in the world, both of which were essential. One was to allow things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence, and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of that whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective. The other was to step outside the flow of experience and ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another.

Conclusion

Of course, this is not a comprehensive or exhaustive list. But with this post what I wanted to do is to draw some parallels from the work of a set of very different authors. Which hopefully adds to the credibility of their observations and conclusions.

In the upcoming post, I will connect these themes with the work of Carl Rogers to talk about how his ideas inadvertently offer a way to help humans be more complexity-proof.