Educated Leadership Blog readers! Welcome back to another week.
We were asked to observe a video on YouTube where a group of people completed an organizational exercise that required them to find order out of seeming chaos. The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QKeKQ2O3E
As you have now hopefully seen, the group finds stability out of chaos in rather short order. They did so with very few rules, an open work area, a defined goal, and the ability to move (act) as they needed. The laughter of the group that occurred when Professor Obolensky asked the group, “What would have happened if I had chosen a leader for this exercise?” was a good indicator of how much more efficient the use of some seemingly simple principles is for dealing with chaos and complexity.
The principles can be broken into what Obolensky calls the 4-plus-4 model of leading (2016, p. 105). For a team to be capable of cogently dealing with chaos, they should be provided with clear, explicit and individual objectives. From this, they can derive an underlying, implicit and unifying common purpose. The group will also need their boundaries defined. Within these boundaries, they can have discretion and freedom to act. The group also needs to know a few simple rules of the organization. Knowing these rules, the skill and will of the individuals can be freed up greater than in organizations that do not define these edges. Lastly, the group needs to receive continuous and unambiguous feedback. This information will provide them guidance when dealing with ambiguity or randomness that is far from equilibrium.
In the video, the group has a set boundary (the room), a clear objective (maintain a spot equidistant from two other people), a few simple rules (don’t tell the people you are using as markers, move slowly, stop when you are equidistant from them), and they have continuous feedback via their eyes as to how they are progressing toward their goal. The group had the underlying goal of finding out what would happen. They had the discretion to move where they needed. They had the skill to move as necessary. Lastly, they found order in the chaos and were able to move to the solution quickly.
The impact this exercise had on my perception of chaos theory was to further impress upon me the fact that chaos is not something to fear, but something that can be managed with the proper leadership techniques. As Eric Berlow noted in his TEDTalk (2010) opportunity can be found in chaos. Obolensky has now provided us with more tools for assisting the groups we lead in dealing with complexity.
Tying these principles to strategic planning and strategy in general, we can look forward to chaos and complexity as opportunities and not risks. Now that we, at the Educated Leadership blog, are becoming far more comfortable with chaos theory we have a strategic advantage over other organizations and leaders that shy away from chaos, leaving us even more capability to differentiate our products and teams. Our experience with chaos also provides us the tools to review and revise our strategic plans as the dynamics impact the fidelity of our initial strategy.
Obolensky, N. (Producer). (2008). Who Needs Leaders? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QKeKQ2O3E
Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership (2nd ed.). London and New York: Taylor & Francis Group.
Talks, TED. (Producer). (2010). Eric Berlow: Simplifying complexity. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB2iYzKeej8
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