I garden. More in theory than in practice. But I garden. For years, I’ve harboured hopes of bountiful harvests from my tiny vegetable patch. Several summertime pregnancies and a PhD have led to less than impressive vegetable harvests, though I can’t be accused of not having been productive in other areas. Well, this weekend, chaos happened – a hailstorm struck. Hailstones as large as pingpongballs redecorated our car bonnet and wiped out the vegetable patch. Depressing. Everything flattened, berry branches snapped, fruit knocked from trees. Clearly not ‘complex’ – no amount of safe-fail experimentation could have helped me see this emergent phenomenon. The crisis task force is me, my husband, a broom, a rake and a secateurs. So far, so good. A one-off chaotic event. But how would I manage if exposed to a series of hailstorms, locust plagues, droughts and rampant mole attacks? Cry, give up, persist?
This brings me to chaos and complexity and an extension of my first blog. How to know what situation you’re dealing with and what ‘psychology’ is needed for appropriate responses? A friend, coordinator of an organisation focusing on agricultural development, sighed last week after an encounter with a colleague. She had just spent two days discussing the relevance of complexity science in a workshop I co-organised on ‘navigating complexity’. And the next day faced this colleague wanting to standardise context-specific agricultural production processes into THE manual. His insistence on a ‘simple’ product jarred with her perspective on the inherent complexity of agricultural systems. It made her wonder what can be expected of people. Is it that some minds are simply more at home with the knowable, while others perfectly at ease with the emergent? If so, how can this match job expectations? Separate out tasks into the four domains and allocate them according to staff members’ psychologies? How feasible (or useful) would that be? And what to do about oneself as a ‘leader’? How do you know and cope with your own limitations? If you know you’re dealing with complexity but are uncomfortable with a merry jumble of parallel experiments or narratives, you can’t just hand over your job as coordinator. That’s not how management systems work. Or should they?
Irene Guijt
Comments (2)
Allocating leadership roles according to psychological categorisation doesn't produce great results (see the abuses of Myers-Briggs and other similar tests in many organisations).
All human beings have the capacity to adapt and, at the same time, we constantly scan for patterns we recognise and feel secure/comfortable with... it's how leaders in an organisation juggle this paradox that impacts how people deal with complex situations.
Maybe the answer lies in encouraging team, collective or network thinking to ensure you get input from a variety of people who are more or less comfortable with chaos/emergence and systems ?
Posted by Cheryl | June 30, 2008 8:57 AM
Posted on June 30, 2008 08:57
Yes, Cheryl. The abuses of such typologies are many. I'm no fan of absolute and static categorisations of people. My musings were more related to being realistic about what one can expect at a certain point in terms of behaviour adaptation, and how to construct processes that recognise some personal limits while keeping the challenge for change alive. There is simply quite a gap between the theory of leadership/learning as articulated in the complexity domain of the Cynefin framework and most realities, which needs to be recognised.
Posted by Irene | July 3, 2008 7:33 AM
Posted on July 3, 2008 07:33