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From the Moribund to the Strategic – an Invitation to Conversations that matter

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How does one understand and grapple with complex intractable issues such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, violence, etc. in order to create better and more enduring outcomes?

These challenges cannot easily be traced to simple causes – and therefore are not amenable to superficial treatments. One needs to go beyond the current world of order, into the deeper layers of society – in order to explore other dimensions of reality, such as the Social and Cultural.

What is your current portfolio of capabilities for understanding spaces beyond your current world of Order? Can you understand the Complex? Is the landscape of your world Complex?

Most of those who deal with Ordered Systems – are either responsible for dysfunction, get less than optimal results for their work, are facing complex intractable challenges, or, are looking to create new Value, but not sure how to do that. All existing avenues have been exhausted. They also anticipate and increase complexity and uncertainty and do not know how to navigate it.

In order to do that, they need to look beyond their worlds of Order – Beyond their current understandings in Healthcare, Finance or Education, for example. They are uncertain about how to do that – there is not much clarity. The emerging world seems very complex and no clear paths are visible. Purely rational models (ways of constructing knowledge)of the modern, industrial era do not work.

Knowing how we know
For this one needs to revisit the way one constructs knowledge of the world in which we propose to intervene – because we have exhausted the potential of what used to be an Ordered World, and this new world that we propose to discover, is unfamiliar and not amenable to conventional ways of knowing and understanding.

Bigger Picture – Divergence – Opening up Strategic Options Spaces:
Having acquired new ways of knowing, more conducive to knowing complex situations, one needs to understand a complex reality – something that includes a complex landscape of possibilities.

The opportunity to create New and Novel value lies beyond the borders of current regimes of order. One then gets an understanding of a new whole, which can be described and a way to speculate possible pathways through that complexity.

This new whole that includes the world beyond the worlds of order is complex, and does not necessarily reduce complexity or uncertainty – if that is what you were trying to get a handle on – it just describes the real nature of the whole world and in some cases the possible reasons why it is so.

It however enables you to have much richer conversations that include several perspectives, or rather, does not ignore or leave out any perspective just in the interest of simplification or reduction. It points to the errors in the current models of the world of order.

Through these expanded and richer conversations it becomes possible to move forward in a better-informed path-finding. The process therefore ends in an Invitation to a strategic conversation, which would include deeper insights and therefore result in more strategic outcomes.

Carve out New Opportunities and Intervene
Now you can carve out opportunities from a richer landscape and develop interventions being guided by a new Strategic Architecture – a new set of Principles.

Acting in Complexity

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What does it mean to say, ’embrace complexity!’. This is something I have been pondering about for a while.

It is the recognition of a new kind if order – something we did not have language for – we also know the grammar of that expression- sometimes it is in visible structures but more often than not the structures are invisible. This is particularly true of human enterprise. It is much like a complex elephant – the kind that six blind men in the Jataka story try to figure out.

The purposeful human enterprise is a special case. When it encounters the real world, it must figure out how to make sense of and respond to this complexity in order to still achieve its purpose.

It needs the grammar and the language so that it can construct an appropriate response. It uses this to construct a model and Cilliers says this model must correspond as closely as possible to the world, but Borges or Foucault say that’s not possible. So, we are somehow condemned to never knowing completely- and yet we must act.

But we are no longer completely ignorant – what we have learnt is rather than command the world and expect it to obey, we invite it to a dance, and through this process, it reveals the balance of its secrets- that is our path to better knowledge. We cannot impose our will but tango and jazz.

The conversation is one that can anticipate and predict how the world will respond to our enquiries and requests.

The world is already engaged in a creative process – our presence must not intervene in its poetry but become co-creative.

The challenge for those that work in the design of new (digital) experiences, is to explore the transformational potential that digitizations harbor. Rather than slap digital onto the enterprise it asks how can one reimagine the enterprise in a fundamentally new way. Maybe develop better responses to some unanswered questions or wicked challenges. What are those?

To begin the process, we must have better knowledge – of what? What are the questions we must have good answers for? What has been worrying us – irrespective of whether a particular design challenge is on our mind. Could we make a strategic difference by considering something beyond the everyday?

Understanding the world is surely necessary, but so is the conception of a response- an enterprise that is a partner in the new creative endeavor- of value, perhaps more strategic!

Design schools do not have a discipline or practice that is analogous to the challenges strategic advisors face. The response is an artifact – the making of design principles.

The world cannot be described in a single way – the creative practitioner engages in a dialog and finds many answers – in that sense the practice is open-ended, but the essence, or the pearls start to reveal and speak the language of complex order. That is something we can learn from creative practitioners – how they pursue for discovery.

You need many probes, and single dives are inadequate- you must probe from many vantages – and many dimensions – like a grid one superimposes to tesselate and construct a whole image (techniques of painting from a photograph) – but it is all in the pursuit of seeking an answer to something – the pursuit of a more important question.

It calls for a deeper persistent engagement- not a one time thing – it is like acupuncture probes, or, constructing a jigsaw puzzle. You cannot do it in one setting.

We need to see new relationships- not the visible ones alone but the invisible ones within their own spaces and across spaces. Structures and flows lead to patterns in outcomes. Both structures and flows are novel.

How do you in your own world probe the unknown? What are your practices? What language and grammar do you use for understanding complexity?

When you see a swarm or beehive – when you see congestion or segregation – what questions arise? Are there analogous situations in your world? A catalog of the wicked.

What practices can you adopt or adapt? How do you construct questions? In the story of the sampling of the elephant in the Indian Jataka fable, and the formation of a fuzzy image. What is fuzzy logic here?

What you will ultimately behold still depends – self reflection and critique will reveal what perspectives inform your pictures of the world. What metaphors are at play? Landscapes and ecosystems.

Others will too. Another conversation- a meta conversation now occurs among our pictures – for we must now together construct yet another meta synthesis – a consensus tempered and informed by our purpose and the pragmatics of its realization. Once again, either we can conquer the landscape and impose on it a path, or invite a living organism to a dance.

Strategic design is about those choices – the degrees of intimacy we want in our relationship with the world – should we continue to act in narrow interests or become custodians of the worlds we inhabit.

The context of the larger Value Creating Complex and our own Value Creating Enterprise within it matter

In the Designed world of new experiences, there is more freedom for the agents – complex phenomena are likely to occur (fluid recombination) – harvesting from those appropriately is what is strategic- to anticipate and be proactive – how does complexity additionally manifest in digital worlds?

I could have used a sub-title for this post – Weaving tapestries – the warp of creative practice and the weft of complex human social worlds

An Upside to the Down – systems, foundational to Strategic Impact

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The practice of Strategic Impact Making, particularly in complex contexts, touches on many bodies of knowledge and practices. However, this brief note talks about how Systems Practice is foundational to such work.

Assuming that all such work begins with a certain objective, an issue or challenge that needs addressing, the System/s associated with that issue become the ‘Text’ that one tries to understand and decipher.

The heart of the Systems Impact making task involves understanding the natural evolution of the system in the face of Contextual Forces and the kind of interventions one might or must make to shift the System’s trajectory in a desired direction, towards a better outcome.

In order to understand the impact of any system of forces, whether contemporary, emerging or future, one would need to have an understanding of how the system would behave in its interaction with those forces. It would naturally be impossible, for example, to say anything about the future of such a system, without that foundational understanding.

For complex systems that implies understanding the system in its many dimensions, at many scales – from micro to mega and the interactions among and between them.

It also implies understanding the Context. Now, there is usually much literature, of a generic nature about Contextual issues – such as one might find, the Future of an Industry, a Sector, or some other Social or Environmental issue as an example.

However, most such discourses are of a generic nature. They make claims that are varied, depending on who makes them and they change with time. They have implied in them ideological paradigms, worldviews etc., which might be worth examining critically.

However, they serve a limited purpose. The issue that you might be working on or interested in is often a specific issue, located in a specific local context. Understanding such an issue might benefit from the Generic descriptions mentioned above, but basing your actions purely on these would mot certainly be problematic and likely sources of serious error.

This is why an investment in discovering and understanding the systems you are engaged with is crucial. A deliberate attempt should be made in this process to correct for any errors in understanding by going broad and deep.

When dealiing with complex challenges, the discovery process leads to the uncovering of a complex reality, and an ecology of systems – wide in variety.

This uncovering turns your world upside down, but to borrow from an eponymous title of a book (Homer-Dixon – The Upside of Down), there is great strategic advantage in this process – An Upside to the Down.