Approximate reading time: 2 minutes
You do not immediately think of banks in terms of immune systems, rivers, cities, anthills, flocks of birds and swarms of bees. Yet quietly, not quite behind the scenes, an expert in infectious diseases and team of scientists are working on just such a link.
Actions that make perfect sense to Barclays for example, may not make sense to HSBC and the rest of the tribe. In other words, if we want to make the banking system more stable—and who does not these days—we have to consider the dynamics of the system as a whole.
This approach has various names, but one that may have come your way already is complex adaptive systems. Faced with that mouthful if you glaze over you are forgiven. There is nothing easy about such systems, especially when it comes to making predictions about how they will behave.
In 2009, Executive Director, Financial Stability at the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane compared the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China with the collapse of Lehman Brothers when it filed for bankruptcy.
Both incidents triggered panic and many unpredictable and worrying consequences. As he pointed out both were part of a complex adaptive network. “Complex because these networks were a cat’s-cradle of interconnections, financial and non-financial.”
Which brings us to your own organisation. Starting with you, it’s filled with individuals who are themselves complex adaptive systems. So making predictions about how your people and your organisation will behave in any given situation is fraught with potholes for the unwary.
Quite simply, the old model of organisation as mechanistic where if you pulled a particular lever something entirely predictable would happen, is dead in the water. To extend the metaphor, these days we cannot be sure there is anything attached to whatever lever we try to pull.
So in terms of day to day activity, what difference does thinking about your organisation as a complex adaptive system make?
We can sum up some of the consequences this way:
OLD APPROACH
· Always go for simplicity
· Aim for certainty
· Clarify most things
· Ignore pessimists
· Choose big bang solutions
NEW APPROACH
· Acknowledge complexity
· Live with paradox
· Accept a good enough vision
· Consider the shadow side
· Link simple systems
