Do you feel that our world has become overwhelmingly complex? Impossible to understand, increasingly difficult to cope with? Each day, it seems to get worse. Can this go on forever, or will it eventually reach a terminal point? If so, what might this point look like, and how might we struggle our way through it?
We all knew COVID couldn’t last forever, right? Things would eventually stabilize and get more-or-less back to normal. No masks, no distancing, no occupancy limits, no travel restrictions, no lasting health worries. And here we are. Or are we? The lifting of many restrictions obscures some huge changes that have occurred while COVID ruled. Here’s my take on the most significant and likely permanent changes.
Disaster in the form of a black swan is quite often the first indication of excess complexity. From a management viewpoint, this is not a good way to find out. Unfortunately, there are not many effective ways to gauge complexity levels. Here are a few ways to deal constructively with largely invisible complexity before it morphs into a black swan event.
Everything is changing. Today, you have a binary choice: to proactively reinvent your business, or to stand by reactively while change reinvents it for you. The latter may well prove fatal. A warzone analogy is useful here because the skills needed to win today are battlefield skills. You should know what these skills are.
