Complexity Inside & Out: Understanding and working with complexity at many scales

How do we do good work, when we don’t know what to do?

The seventh cohort of this program launches on October 1. Registration is now open.

Over the past 26 years we have worked with all kinds of organizations and communities facing change, conflict, growth, uncertainty and the need to make important decisions together. Increasingly, we find ourselves working with people who are facing situations where there is no obvious answer, even when there is plenty of expertise in the room.

Sometimes the challenge is organizational culture or leadership. Sometimes it is strategy or systems change. Sometimes it is simply the difficulty of trying to work well together when circumstances keep changing, or finding new ways to approach a problem that seems intractable.

These are complex situations, and one of the most useful things we have learned is that complexity requires different ways of working. There are lots of problems for which expertise, analysis and planning are exactly what is needed. But when people are involved, conditions are changing, and every action we take changes the situation itself, it becomes much harder to know in advance what will work.

For us, a key question has become: How do we do good work when we don’t know what to do?

Complexity practice helps us distinguish between situations where we can rely on what we know and situations where we need to learn our way forward.

Complexity informed approaches help us to develop more ways of seeing what is happening and having more choices about how to respond. 

In practice, that means developing our capacity to:

• notice patterns before rushing to explain or solve them;
• bring different perspectives together to see more of what is happening;
• understand some of the conditions and constraints that are holding patterns in place;
• try things at a scale where we can learn without overcommitting ourselves;
• make sense of what happens and adjust our next move accordingly.

Over the years we have also come to understand that this work isn’t only about what is happening in organizations and systems. We are part of the complexity too.

The uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of control that characterize complex situations can provoke some very familiar  responses in human beings. We can become attached to certainty, defend what we think we know, narrow our attention, stop listening well, or reach for control precisely when the situation requires curiosity and openness to other possibilities. 

This is why we call the course Complexity Inside & Out.

We pay attention to three interconnected areas of practice: what happens inside ourselves, what happens between us, and what happens in the larger structures and systems in which we are working. Our beliefs, emotions, identities and reactions influence how we listen, speak, make decisions and use power. Those interactions create patterns between us, while the structures and histories of the systems we inhabit shape what is possible and influence us in return. 

There is a useful correspondence between the practices we use across all three. Whether we are working with ourselves, a team or a larger system, we learn to notice patterns, get curious about what is holding them in place, seek perspectives we don’t already have, make small moves in a direction we want to go, and pay attention to what happens next.

Complexity Inside & Out is our attempt to bring much of this practice together in one place. During the program we work with:

• ways of understanding different kinds of problems and situations, including Cynefin;
• patterns, constraints and approaches to creating change in complex systems;
• participatory dialogue, process design and decision making;
• stories, collective sensemaking and working with multiple perspectives;
• iterative approaches to action and evaluation;
• inner inquiry and practices for noticing and shifting our own reactive patterns, assumptions and limiting stories. 

This is not primarily a course in complexity theory. We use theory where it helps us see and act differently, but the emphasis is on practice.

Participants bring their own work and questions into the program. We spend time applying the ideas, trying practices together, reflecting on what happens and learning from the different contexts and experiences in the group. 

The course is especially useful for people who have some responsibility for helping others navigate uncertainty: leaders and managers, facilitators, consultants, coaches, evaluators, community organizers, and people doing organizational and systems change work. You don’t need a background in complexity theory. You might simply recognize the experience of being responsible for something important and realizing that nobody really knows what to do next.

We don’t expect people to leave with a formula for complexity, because there isn’t one. What we hope you leave with is a richer repertoire of ways to notice, make sense and act; a stronger capacity to work with your own responses when things become difficult; and more confidence in finding a way forward with others when there is no map to follow.

Increasingly, that seems to us to be an essential part of leadership and good work in the world we are living in.

Join us for our seventh cohort of Working with Complexity from the Inside Out and please share this invitation with anyone you know who might benefit from this deep dive into practice.