Editing out complexity is critical to finding Roadmaps where others find overwhelm.

Strategists and the public alike are feeling overwhelmed with the growing list of critical challenges of our time.?

We hear it when talking with our children about the world we live in.

15 Global Challenges – The Millennium Project (millennium-project.org) ?

We hear it around Board and Executive tables when we look at specific industry conundrums.

Chiefs of Transformation need to encourage a greater range of Planning and Problem solving capabilities than is typically available to one Executive functional discipline, one perspective, one school of thought, one methodology.

When it starts to get really tough in business, there is a strong tendency among us to push through / persist / hang in there. When perhaps this should be a sign that we need to expand our perspectives and look at the problem differently.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

~ Albert Einstein

Or you might prefer the even more pointed phrase also often attributed to Einstein:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

~ Albert Einstein

The term Managed Adaptive Decline (MAD), meaning ‘adapting to declining conditions in a well-managed way’ was coined by Larry Quick and David Platt of Resilient Futures and its sense of irony really resonates with me. I can recall myself standing among a leadership team doing exactly this. We did not Expand our strategic frame. We did not Explore beyond the industry norms. We did not Expose the fundamental flaws in our thinking. We stuck to our approach that had worked well in previous business cycles. Each budget cycle, the work got harder. Through discipline and grind we squeezed out ‘well managed’ results while the fundamental trajectory of the industry continued to shift. Our service model was being superseded.

Drifting with our Planning and Problem solving approaches is not the way we are going to see more successful transitions and less people caught suffering disruption this decade.

Just as approaching complex situations with simple and straight-forward solutions is not useful, seeing everything as complex in complex situations is also not useful.

This thinking overwhelms strategists in critical challenges of our time such as affordable and accessible healthcare, sustainable fresh water, sustainable and competitive energy, safe reliable data sharing and the list goes on…

Think outside the box.?

Think outside your current Planning Methods model – get outside of your ‘go-to’ box and try another.

For example, dialling up our Agency, our Ability to Act, while not increasing the uncertainty.

This is a powerful and very useful approach to consider.

I find this story of Elon Musk a well-known advocate of this type of thinking and planning a useful illustration to share with Executive teams.

Editing out complexity is critical to finding Roadmaps where others find overwhelm.

First principles thinking is a mode of inquiry borrowed from physics that is designed to relentlessly pursue the foundations of any given problem from fundamental truths.??

Elon Musk has deployed this thinking strategy to give himself an unfair advantage when developing new batteries, a key component for both Tesla and SolarCity.??

Elon Musk describing first principles thinking in an interview with Kevin Rose that was shared with me by Peter Diamandis:

“I think it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [When reasoning by analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done or it is like what other people are doing — slight iterations on a theme.?

First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there.?

Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”

With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”

It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a sealed can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”

It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”

First principles thinking works so well because it gives us a proven strategy for editing out complexity and allows entrepreneurs to sidestep the tide of popular opinion.

Where can you apply this thinking to seemingly impenetrable challenges?

• Proactive and affordable healthcare?
• Fresh food delivery?
• Cutting through the noise in communications?
• Other?

What is the challenge on your mind?

Bernie

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PS: I have been working on first principle thinking for the role of Chief of Transformation itself. Just when the challenges are growing and the pace of change accelerating, leaders are provided incompatible frameworks, incomplete analogies, and conflicting leadership advice. I have been working with leaders from around the globe to distil the fundamentals and dramatically increase navigating effectiveness.?We have C-suite cohorts working in Pods on the deep fundamentals and loving the new perspectives. If this is of interest to you, please connect and direct message me here on LinkedIn to discuss whether there is a fit with your situation.

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Bernie is known for building capability and confidence in leaders who need to transform organisations that are continually reshaping to survive and thrive.

From first-hand experience as an executive leading through major transitions and over 10,000 hours in facilitation and training for organisational transformation, Bernie sets leadership teams to build change-fitness to deliver what matters.

Bernie welcomes connecting with and talking to leaders tackling the challenges of organisational transition.

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