Notes – Tony Quinlan, Complexity Lounge, 12th March 2024

Different perspectives on the system around the challenge are essential

Some people are experts in the situation, the day-to-day experience, others are experts on the subject matter or the topic – all may be useful

More than just scanning what’s happening, scanning the present

Take a step back from your challenge and notice the different things that are around it

Identify things that can’t be done, and the adjacent possibles

Look at the people, the systems, the beliefs, the norms

Objectives and KPIs don’t work in complex systems – they produce gaming behaviours, bad outcomes, situational blindness

Think about what you’ve see that holds the seeds of what you want

Think about what you’ve seen that clings to an outdated past

So, thinking again about your challenge, what direction are you headed in? What do you want to see more of? What do you want less of?

“Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people” (John Kay, Financial Times)

Re-weaving the bowl so that the ball (culture) settles differently. What is the weave, and how can it be reshaped?

What are the things that play into the challenge you’re facing? What influences things – some for the better, worse, influence. What are the factors?

Scanning, looking not for signs of success/failure, but for new things, changes both in your challenge and in related challenges

Maintaining an attitude of curiosity

Monitor for things that are changing

Look at the influencing factors, the elements that shape what’s happening

Run experiments around those – try small nudges, keep watching for red flags

Build in diversity – diversity of skills and knowledge

Great session of the complexity lounge, with Tony Quinlan from last week, exploring seven principles for engagement with complex social systems, as part of the journey towards his forthcoming book.

- Shift the “system”, don’t solve the problem

- Build in diversity

- See the landscape (to inform your next steps)

- Set direction, not destination

- Take oblique approaches

- Monitor broadly

- Nudge and experiment, in safe to learn situations

Other recordings here https://lnkd.in/edGWZFYN – thanks to John Selberg + Barbara Frontera for organizing and hosting.

I thought the small groups were great (but, sadly, I was the person who had to leave part way through!).

I thought the examples you used (e.g. reweaving the bowl so that it has a different shape, and the ball settles differently) were very helpful.

I find the headline phrases for the seven principles a bit clunky (you might want to have a look at the discussions about framing and wording around Adam Kahane’s forthcoming book). I also wondered whether a principle about making connections across actors, to support emergence, might be an important add.

I appreciated you explaining that and why you may not talk “systems” with clients.

I always feel a bit uneasy when people (not especially you) talk about working out how they can change other’s behaviour – this sometimes seems inappropriate to me. And changing the environment/container so that people are enabled to make different choices, if they want to, is less pushy/forcey and more likely to be sustained.

All of which points maybe, to the possibility of giving some additional emphasis to what difference following the principles might make to the actors in the “system” and the ways in which they (choose to) behave, and to the “system” dynamics & the outcomes they generate