Working in the Social World: Complex Adaptive Systems

Last week I had the honor and fun of keynoting at Defrag. It was my first Defrag conference and I was not entirely sure what to expect aside from knowing it was a forum for deeper thinking about enterprise technologies. I was pleasantly surprised that both presenters and attendees were talking about big ideas and wanted to explore not the next step forward but the next leap forward. I also found people ready and willing to challenge ideas assertively – something that is not always acceptable in other milieus but something I really enjoy and find necessary to challenge my own thinking.

My presentation covered some of the core concepts that underpin my thinking about how the world is changing and why a community management approach is growing in urgency within our organizations. The distilled version it is that the world is becoming more complex, which has some big implications:

• Complexity must be managed simply (complexity managed with complexity is a disaster)
• There are few verifiably ‘right’ answers in complex environments (possibly why traditional ROI models are breaking down) and being able to make decisions when faced with ambiguity is critical
• Trying to ‘control’ things at best doesn’t work and at worst deceives people from seeing reality, creating unnecessary risk

The more involved story is that when I was an analyst at IDC I had the opportunity to learn system dynamics modeling using a tool called Vensim. It radically shifted how I thought of markets and business dynamics and opened up a world of possibility in terms of forecasting behaviors, which when compiled, generated aggregate market behavior. From there I started reading more about complex systems. This presentation was my attempt to distill the core tenants of complex adaptive systems and then propose how I believe it changes how we need to think about business strategy, management and measurement.