Complexity, a mostly unexplored opportunity

Complexity, Values and Engagement 

Dr. Bettina Geiken, Integral Projects and Delia Mensitieri, ATOLO

The power of complexity

“We are living in complex times”. This is a statement that we hear all the time, but what does this actually mean? The notion of complexity often even has a negative connotation to it. Something complex is associated with difficulty, chaos and being unmanageable. However, what if complexity has its perks and can be leveraged? Could companies use complexity to their strategic advantage? Buckle up, this is going to be a wild ride through the maze of complexity, values and engagement.

Let’s start with the meaning of complexity. Applied complexity science says that something is complex when different components interact with each other in ways you cannot always foresee. Examples are the human brain, infrastructure such as our power grids, social and economic organisations such as cities, an ecosystem and just the entire universe itself. A very concrete one, we are all experiencing right now...the Corona crisis. The difficulty is prediction and therefore controlability. How can we predict something that seems chaotic, different, new and with so many different interacting components to think about, in other words non-linear? Well, here it becomes interesting...as we take a scientist approach. To understand how a given complex system works, we start conducting small experiments in parallel. Based on the feedback we receive, we adapt our experiments and little by little we start understanding the inner workings of this complex system. 

As an every-day example, when travelling somewhere new, you might start reading about the destination and try to imagine/predict how it will be. However, once you arrive at your destination you realise that the reality is a lot more complex than expected when reading in your Lonely Planet. You need to adapt. So you try to figure out when the restaurants are open, what you like to eat, what you should wear, how the public transport works, .... The first days are always a bit of a quest, trying things out and seeing what works best. However, after a couple of days, you almost feel at home. You have figured out this new complex system.  

At the workplace we encounter complex systems everyday. One of the most complex systems in companies is organisational culture. Everybody who starts to work in a new company knows that it takes quite some time to test and figure out how the company culture works, with its obvious elements and the more subtle unspoken expectations around it. 

One way that companies might try to manage this complexity is by simplifying their organisational culture into values. They create a set of predefined values and link these to specific behaviors. For example, we could link specific behavioral kpi’s to the value of “entrepreneurship”; “how many initiatives did you launch and execute this quarter”, “how many sales did you bring in”, “how much work related content did you post on your social media”, … . This linking between values and behavior is a way to create alignment between employees, the organization and the overall strategy. But little do organisations realize that by doing so they might be missing out on a great potential that complexity brings: diversity. 

Diversity is inherent to complex systems: the diversity of opinions, experiences, ideas, intentions, perspectives, expectations. This diversity contains vital information on what is really happening, new tendencies, innovative ideas, but also blind spots in management and leadership. It is diversity that drives creativity and innovation. However, to deal with diversity is not easy. It is a human reaction when you are confronted with very different viewpoints or when you find yourself in a state of “I don't know”, that automatic programs pop up to control, wanting to make sure everyone is on the same page and does things the only “right” way. So we try to align different viewpoints into a relatively narrow “truth”, such that the unmanageable becomes manageable again, at least in our perception. 

And in some contexts, you do not want a diversity of opinions. In situations where a clear protocol is needed, alignment is the right strategy. For instance, when doctors work in an operations room, we definitely want to be sure that those working there are completely aligned and are doing exactly the same “right” behaviors in terms of hygiene, washing hands and putting on protective clothing and following protocols and check-lists. This is what you find in the Cynefin Framework as operating in the simple or complicated domain vs complex and chaotic (Snowden & Boone 2007).

But in contexts where there is not always a clear and linear protocol that we can follow, alignment might not be the ideal solution. Also in these rapidly changing times, companies need to be adaptive and innovative if they want to continue to be in business. So what if they could actually tap into the natural diversity in organisations and use it to create a resilient corporation. Personal values, in the sense of how employees live them (and hence not predefined) can play an important role here to mitigate complexity and navigate complex-adaptive systems in order to enjoy the full potential that diversity can bring for organisations.

Values and business: an attempt to manage complexity

We have been working with organisations around engagement of employees. Anyone working in this field, knows that when you talk about engagement you also talk about values in one way or the other. Not values in the sense of what something is worth, but in its social-psychological meanings: an desirable (end-) state that drives people or also positive human drivers. 

That values are important for economic success and performance has become a generally accepted notion. Since the 80ies of the last century more and more companies have gone to great lengths to define and redefine their core values and make these values known to everyone in the company in many ways through workshops, employee events, posters, websites etc. 

However, more often than not, either the company values are not actually known and if they are known, many employees do not really understand how these values could be relevant for them in their daily work. 

So how do you define a value? For many, values tend to be abstract, and many value concepts are indeed vague. To try to define and or even align on values such as respect or honesty can lead to heated debates at the dinner table. 

Only when we take some time to make a connection between abstract concepts of values and our personal experiences, will we obtain a personal felt sense of those values that give them importance and meaning for our life. 

For example, ten people holding the value of friendship will have different personal experiences and ideas that they associate with friendship. Because of this, no one has the same definition of friendship nor is there one specific set of behaviour that is linked to friendship. If so, all your friends should behave the same to be labelled as “friend”. And when is that ever the case? What we do see is a general direction of what this value implies. We cannot define it, but in one way or another it drives all sorts of different behaviours that all embody the value of friendship. 

So, given our different definitions, ideas, beliefs, and experiences around values, it is almost irrational to even expect alignment of meaning, let alone alignment of behaviour.

But beyond intellectual definitions, almost every human being is able to connect to values as positive human drivers with its underlying difference in definitions, ideas, beliefs and behaviours. This phenomena of the felt sense of values sharing a direction we can call coherence. Coherence as it has been initially defined by Antonovsky in 1987 includes comprehensibility, meaningfulness and manageability (Eriksson & Mittelmark 2017).

Let's zoom in to the difference between alignment of values and coherence of values a bit further.

Coherence VS Alignment

Alignment of values means to create definitions of what that value means in terms of beliefs, ideas and behaviour and try to make everyone adopt this definition. This is a strategy to control the unknowns. We try to create a protocol based on a defined set of values. 

Coherence, in turn, emerges through meaningful interconnections between distinct human beings or groups of human beings. Coherence embraces and invites diversity in the interpretation of values. It is more a state of mind and the quality of a field around a certain topic, such as culture, where alignment is more an action. Actually, linguistically speaking, there is no real verb for coherence, but there is one for alignment. 

What we still see a lot is that alignment of values top-down is still the norm in many companies. By creating a defined set of values, with a precise set of behaviours, ensures that people’s ideas and behaviour are more controllable, less uncertain and more aligned. This approach minimizes diversity in the way people think and behave and as a side-effect minimizes creativity, innovation and motivation too. 

Let’s take the example of the Research & Development (R&D) department of a logistics company. They tend to be organised around a set of rather streamlined or conformist values and principles, ensuring a predictability of operations such as reliability, strong customer focus, precision etc.

For the (R&D) department those same values are not always appropriate. In R&D individual initiative, thinking outside the box combined with strategic thinking are vital to stay creative and innovative. In one of the in-house values training the company evaluated the innovative and “non-conformist” people against the standard company values, detecting obviously mismatches and pointing out individual points for improvement to better match the standard company values. This led to strong friction among the participants, a sense of feeling completely misunderstood, and ultimately to demotivation as individual contributions were completely disregarded. The trainees complained and managed to convince the HR to revise the values training. The next values training actually started with the personal disposition and values of the employees, their contribution and how this would feed into the company values.

Research from the last 15 years has indeed shown that it is mostly the felt sense of coherence between personal values and corporate values that contributes strongly to engaged and motivated employees, which is what business leaders know makes the difference in performance for their business. In other words when employees are aware and connected to their personal values and have the work environment to live by them, their work engagement increases significantly (Posner & Schmidt (2008).

Coherence: the "new" alignment? 

There are already key players in organisational development who are picking up on the coherence vs alignment tension and found ways to harness diversity and provide a sense of coherence.

In fact, when you actually start looking at personal values as positive human drivers and you provide the space for people to discover their own values AND connect to those values on a deeper emotional level through storytelling and narratives it becomes a game changer. 

Common to many of these approaches is that the connection to one’s personal values is the basis from which to reach out and connect to the corporate values. 

At the same time this connecting to or tuning into the company values or guiding principles will differ from one colleague to the other as everyone has a different set of personal values. Yet everyone is contributing in their own way to company values. All these contributions are coherent, but “technically speaking” you are not aligned with how company values and behavior are being defined.

This coherence approach ensures that everyone can contribute as a whole person, rather than only a very limited role or work identity, to something bigger such as a company's goal, team strategy or even spontaneous initiatives between colleagues. Instead of many contributing the same input and very limited amount of “themselves”, creative solutions can appear that in turn can increase company performance and resilience. (Photo: Anna Leask Flickr)

In fact, research from the known strategy expert Robert Kaplan (Kaplan & Norton 2005) shows that 95% of employees are unaware or do not understand the corporate strategy. However, if companies combine excellence in tactile project management and bottom up coherence to their strategy, teams succeed in delivering the same strategy 90% of the time. Conversely, companies that do not take coherence into account, only 34% of the strategy and goals were delivered on time (Li & Solis, 2013)

Moreover, company values change over time and often due to certain events such as innovations, mergers, market disruption etc, just as the priority we give on a personal level to our values changes over time due to experiences, life challenges, development, skill levels etc. The advantage of the “coherence” approach to changing values in the organisation and the individual is obvious, as in those organisations employees would find it easier to adapt as they actually are aware of their inner (and sometimes changing) reference points and motivational drivers.

Being able to bring all (or most) of yourself to work and contribute to a bigger goal is known to increase the sense of autonomy, belonging and competence and vice versa (see Self-determination Theory). In turn the increase of person’s self-determination increases his/her ability to navigate complex situations (Stewart et al. 2011)

This is a new way that companies could think about values. However, control and ensuring alignment are still widely believed to lead to high performance and achieve KPI’s. Given the nature of the human intellect, controlling provides a much higher and immediate sense of security (Kegan 1994). This is how managers and company leaders often unknowingly accept to “lose” engaged co-worker. For most people with a certain level of self-determination control lowers their engagement and their motivation right away. (Gagne & Deci 2005)

Obviously some degree of control is needed, but we need to look at it in a much more differentiated way - what kind of control for what, for whom in which way, for what purpose beyond appeasing personal insecurity and desires. Based both on research as well as our own experience as trainers and consultants, one important element, that makes many companies disempowering and disengaging places, is the presence of unhealthy control leading to a lack of coherence in the pursuit of strategic goals and organisational purpose.

Just imagine a workplace where people are aware of their own personal drivers, feel most of the time attracted to the organisational purpose (whichever it is), experience and contribute to a trustful culture where autonomy, belonging and competence is actively encouraged, where management and employees have learned to navigate complexity and adapt to or even thrive on changing circumstances without resorting to inappropriate control and command habits, where the diversity of perspectives and behaviours is invited, creating coherence and engagement among people and teams, which is what an organisation needs for outstanding performance, creativity and innovation……

Sounds utopian? It might be challenging and it might take some time to develop competences and culture, but it is possible….an increasing number of organisations have already adopted their version of above mentioned “utopian” approaches, starting often not with the typical top-down change process but with the willingness to look what is really happening and continuous and persistent micro-changes over time supported and lived by management and employees alike. Some of them and show outstanding employee experience, business performance and innovative strength (for some interesting case studies see report on Employee Experience 2020, or read on Deliberate Developmental Organisations). They understood that complexity has its perks. 

What do you think? In which situations would alignment or coherence be preferred, and how would you implement these notions at your workplace? Feel free to comment and share your ideas/opinions with us! We would love to hear them. 

References

Snowden & Boone (2007) - A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making)

Rosenthal & Masarech (2003) High‐performance cultures: How values can drive business results. Vol 22, Issue 2 (pp. 3-18). Journal of Organisational Excellence (Online). Wiley

Antonovky (1987) - Unraveling the mystery of health - San Francisco Jossey Bass

Erisson & Mittelmark (2017) - The sense of coherence and its measurements (pp 97-106). The Handbook of Salutogenesis, Springer, Cham.

Posner & Schmidt (2008) - Values Congruence and the Differences Between the Interplay of Personal and Organizational Value Systems; The Leadership Challenge.  

Kaplan & Norton (2005) - The Office of Strategy Management, Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management)

Li & Solis (2013) - The Seven Success Factors of Social Business Strategy. John Wiley & Sons.

Ryan & Deci (2002) - An overview of self-determination theory (pp. 3-33). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Kegan, R. (1994); In Over Our Heads: The Mental Complexity Of Modern Life. Harvard University Press

Stewart, et al. (2011) - Self-Leadership: A Multilevel Review. Journal of Management

Gagne & Deci (2005) - Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior J. Organiz. Behav. 26, 331–362

Employee Experience 2020 Report:. - EX Leaders Network https://www.exleadersnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/EX-2020-Report-by-EX-Leaders-Network.pdf

Kegan, Lahey, Miller, Fleming, Helsing (2016) - An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Boston - Harvard Business Review Press

Image Introduction by Pete Linforth