Complexity creates a dancing landscape. If simplicity is equivalent to finding the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro and complicated is finding the highest peak of the Rocky mountains, complexity is finding the highest peak of a landscape that keeps on changing because of the continuous movement of earth pushed by internal pressure.
From a management point of view, it means that the landscape of your internal organization and the business world can and will change every day. It means that you need to spend a lot of time exploring the landscape. Why? Every day you and other people around you are making decisions based on the data you have. When the landscape changed, there are two options. Old decisions might create no impact due to the changes, or old decisions can create harm. If you won’t evaluate key decisions against the current landscape, you will reach a waste of resources or old decisions will cause damage.
How to do it? The best way is to depict your landscape, or the key element of your landscape, including interlinked between elements in the landscape. A visual model is easy to review daily, and it’s also easier to see if there are any changes to the visual model. Doing this work based on documents or your brain and memory is more time consuming and prone to errors.
If you spot any change in the landscape, you need to spend more time to realize if this change impacts old decisions. Based on the impact assessment, take action to adjust the decision to current reality. The day after you can follow the same process to verify if the adjustment helped.