How can your team deal with complex challenges ?

Most of the challenges facing leaders today are complex. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model separates the types of situations leaders are confronted with into simple, complicated, complex and chaos, and indicates how each should be dealt with differently (HBR November 2007). A complex challenge requires leaders to probe, sense and respond. How can this model be applied to a team ?

When teams are invited to solve a problem or find solutions for a challenge, they nearly always intuitively move into solution mode very quickly. Each will mentally assess the situation, categorize or analyze the facts and then share which solution is the best and why this is so. “I think we should do this because I used to …”. Experts often save the day. Brainstorming helps to share as many ideas as possible in a short period of time so the team can respond quickly to the issue. Advocating solutions, expert input, brainstorming or sharing best practices works for simple or complicated problems where the Cynefin model prescribes the steps of sense, categorize, respond, and sense, analyze, respond respectively. Simple and complicated problems are prevalent in an “ordered” world where actions have predictable results. Approaching complex problems in the same way leads to half-optimized solutions at best and a team stuck in disagreement at worst; it is often up to the leader to decide what to do. So much for the team’s contribution !

How can a team work through the steps of probing, sensing and responding and tackle complex problems efficiently ?

That’s exactly what Action Learning does. Action Learning is a problem solving process where a small team works on a real and complex business challenge, takes action and learns as individuals and as a team while doing so. Rather than jumping into solution-mode, the ground rule “statements are only made in response to questions” helps the team focus first on what the real issue or challenge is. Perceptions and assumptions are put aside as the team asks questions about the different aspect of the problem. This corresponds to the probing step in the Cynefin model.

Based on the discussion and exchanges in the Action Learning session, each team member will decide what actions to take after the session. They can take action to test out an idea, confirm an assumption or talk to people to collect more information. This is the sensing step in the Cynefin model.

When the team reconvenes to continue their work on the challenge, each will share the result of their actions and what they learned from them. The team will take in this new information about the challenge, and continue to work on shaping the understanding of the situation through questions. This is the responding step in the model. 

For a leader, the Cynefin model describes how to deal with a complex challenge. When this leader wants to empower the team to learn, develop and come up with new ideas, the Action Learning process provides a clear structure and rules to avoid the pitfall of tackling complex challenges through the ubiquitous brainstorming-like “let’s find the solution” approach.

Cynefin and the floods

In my previous blog I introduced in a simple way the Cynefin framework. I discovered this last year, right in the middle of the floods that caused so much destruction in Thailand. The framework helped me at that time to do - with the teams - a reasonably good job of steering our organization through this period. Our manufacturing facilities were not impacted at the time, but our employees and our business activity was.

The flood situation, at least as far as my organization at that time was concerned, can be described as a "complex" problem. Characteristics of complex problems are that they are in flux and unpredictable. There are no right answers, and there are many differing ideas of what should be done. The situation was not simple or complicated, obviously, but also not chaotic. In fact, the events dragged out over several weeks. There was no chaos or sudden dramatic event. Day after day, we obtained (often contradicting) updates from the different news sources on the situation, tried to imagine what could happen, and get ready for those eventualities.

So how did viewing this situation as a "complex" problem help me at all ? As explained in my last blog, the Cynefin framework helps leaders to determine how to react to a problem at hand. For a complex problem, the appropriate approach is Probe - Sense - Respond. The following steps are recommended in the Harvard Business Review article of November 2007.

Open discussions and dissenting views In this kind of situation, a command-and-control approach does not work. The leader does not have the answer any more than the next person. Even the experts had differing opinions about what would happen and about what should be done. Within the organization, we created differeent groups to develop ideas of how we could get ready for all possible scenario. Extreme opinions (from "nothing will happen" to "we're all doomed !") were allowed for discussion.

Set barriers We decided not to review or react to every single piece of "news" or information out there. Internet, blogosphere or Youtube all carried hundreds of snippets of information each day. Considering or evaluating this information overload would have taken half a day. Instead, we created our own measures of the rising water level in our surroundings and objectively and frequently reported this to the people in the organization.

Monitor for emergence Many team members were given the freedom to implement their ideas, even though we did not know the appropriateness at the time. This was not a situation where one could turn to the boss for the correct answers. Allowing all ideas to rise and have people implement most of them created a dynamic and motivation that kept the team going for different weeks.

The crisis turned out OK for the organization although several employees were affected personally. As the leader of the organization, viewing the situation as a complex problem and addressing it with the appropriate approach helped me to maintain the team's motivation and commitment. Having said that, I sincerely hope that nobody needs to encounter this kind of dramatic flood, with our without the Cynefin framework !

Leading with Cynefin

This blog is to share a very interesting model I discovered only about a year ago. In a following blog, I will explore more about a concrete situation where this model very much proved its worth.

I am talking about the Cynefin model, developed by David Snowden. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin will explain the basics of this model (including the meaning and pronunciation of the Welsh word “cynefin”). It has been around for a while but was popularized in the edition of the Harvard Business Review issue of November 2007 (if you google for it you will find a free PDF version online).

The Cynefin framework classifies the problems of this world in five domains, but I do not address the fifth one, disorder, here:

Simple. Here, the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all. The approach to solve problems falling in this domain is Sense - Categorise – Respond. The leader can minimize his involvement, delegate and ensure the appropriate processes are applied to the problem. This is the world of best practices.

Complicated. The relationship between cause and effect can be identified but this requires analysis, investigation or expertise. The problem solving approach is Sense - Analyze – Respond. The leader has to make sure expert opinions are evaluated, and also listen to contradictory advice. 

Complex. The relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, not in advance. The approach to this kind of problems is Probe - Sense - Respond. The leader has to keep an open communication and listen to all suggestions (not just those of the experts). He needs to allow for experimenting and look for the emergence of patterns.

Chaotic. There is no relationship between cause and effect for the problem at hand. The approach is to Act - Sense – Respond. Here, obviously, there is no such thing as using past experience and novel practice is needed. There is point in looking for the "best solution": the leader needs to take action and establish control.

The importance of the model is to realize that different problems require different approaches. We all would like problems to be simple, or complicated at the most, where an action has a clear impact. But that is not how things happen in the real world. As a business person, it is important to be aware of the type of problem you are addressing (simple, complicated, complex or chaotic) and then apply the appropriate approach. Each approach results in “respond” which means taking action. But rather than deciding on the action based on a standard formula, the steps leading to the action are very different (Sense + Categorize, or Sense + Analyze, or Probe + Sense or finally Act + Sense) and depend on the typology of the problem.