Don’t Avoid Complexity, Embrace It!

In the wake of World War II six European nations - Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany - came together to form the European Coal and Steel Community.

It was the first time that countries had embraced a notion of supranationalism and it led, in time, to the establishment of the European Community, the Common Market, and ultimately the modern European Union of 28 states.

It was a march towards a better future, a continent united and without borders, and a Europe that would no longer face the scourge of conflict that had for centuries scarred its landscape.

And then, on a late June day in 2016, everything changed.

Simple Acts, Complex Impacts

The 2016 Brexit referendum was always going to be a close-run thing.

Polls in the lead up to the vote and even on the day of the referendum were tight. While many voters had made up their minds long before polling day there was a significant group of voters that were undecided even on the morning of the vote. Polling firm YouGov put the undecided vote at 13% less than a week before the vote putting their election day prediction of a 52/48 remain vote win well within the margin of error.

As history reveals, the final vote was closer to 52/48 for leaving, and the United Kingdom set itself on a path to become the first state to not only choose to join the European Union project but to then choose to leave that same project.

More Complex than the Moon Landing

A single X in a single ballot box is of little real impact, yet that single X in combination with millions of others can lead to a situation Professor Roland Atler of the Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences in Germany compared in complexity of man landing on the moon.

There are probably hundreds of lessons that can and will be taken from Brexit. Perhaps the most striking lesson of all, though, is also the most simple: small, interconnected and interdependent actions can have inordinate impact on even the largest systems.

Voters were offered a choice of two boxes on a ballot paper and were asked to place an X in one of those boxes. It’s an action so simple a child could manage it and each individual ballot represented less than three one-millionths of one percent of the registered voters in the UK.

Like the butterfly which, by the beating of its wings in Africa, engenders storms in the Caribbean, combine 17,410,742 of those simple and historically unremarkable actions and the result is something far more significant and complex: a shift in economic, social, and foreign policy unequaled in Europe since the collapse of communism.

Complexity All Around

The European Union and its socio-political space is not the only complex system the typical British voter would encounter. Indeed, most of us find ourselves connected to complex systems we can neither truly understand nor predict.

A weekend morning spent in the supermarket choosing between apples and oranges, brands of breakfast cereals, and a myriad of soda choices is in fact an interaction with an incredibly complex system of demand signalling, supply chain optimisation, and agricultural production. Bypassing the broccoli and choosing the cauliflower instead might not change much in your household this week, but if enough other shoppers make the same choice then stores will buy less broccoli, the prices for the vegetable will drop, and farmers will plant less broccoli next year.

In big businesses, too, decisions in one department can have sometimes unpredictable impacts in other departments. A spending cut in HR today might translate into system failures across the board as retirements, maintenance issues, and demands for customer service rise tomorrow.

Where there is complexity it is certain that these emergent phenomena will be found, and predicting them is as essential for business as it is for the diplomats negotiating the Brexit deal.

Don’t Ignore Complexity, Embrace It

Running away from complexity or ignoring it is the wrong approach for business or Brexiteers alike.

Instead, embracing complexity and using technology to draw out the clarity within should be our goal. The tools required to do this are not quite as publicly accessible as the pencil and paper that British voters used in 2016 to begin the Brexit process but they do exist and they are already helping decision makers to choose the best path through the most complex environments.