Getting workable solutions to impossible problems

How did your organisation decide on its last major decision? Maybe it was about the policy on? ‘work from home’? Maybe it was about whether to take a new opportunity? Did the leader set a vision and invite everyone to come on board?? Or was there a deep participative process that came up with a bottom up solution for your company?? Or did the business leadership come up with a set of trials and pilots which are now being rolled out? Did it work?

Many organisations apply one or more of the three tools above.? They might follow a TOP DOWN approach where the leadership team decides and calls on the organisation to support them.? They might use a ‘TEST AND LEARN’ approach where the decision is chunked up into small changes and the approach is modified as the organisation learns.? And sometimes these organisations use a process where the stakeholders together engage to PARTICIPATE & DECIDE.? All three of these are great strategies for landing change, but they only work in specific scenarios.?

Increasingly we are faced with problems that don’t respond well to the above approaches.? They seem unsolvable, and even when we emerge on a solution, often it doesn't stick.? ? A fourth strategy is required for many of the most intractable challenges we face.? For some of the biggest decisions we face today within our organisations, the only process that will achieve a viable answer is a PARTICIPATIVE LOOP.? This is normally a slow, energy intensive process, and is seldom anyone's first choice.? But for certain types of decisions, it is the only one that will get to a workable solution to an impossible problem.

Few things are more frustrating and exhausting than being part of an organisation that embarks on a change programme or decision making process that doesn't succeed at finding a workable decision.? The best organisations are good at understanding the nature of the challenge and applying the appropriate process.?

There are two crucial features of the decision making context that determine which approach will be successful: The ALIGNMENT or the participants and the COMPLEXITY of the decision context

Feature 1:? ALIGNMENT

Every stakeholder arrives with a set of assumptions about what an acceptable solution might look like.? These might be based on values (e.g. “Never negotiate with terrorists”), Priorities (e.g. “My family comes first”) or a view of how the world works (e.g. “Good guys finish last”)?

Sometimes, all we need to do to find a good solution is to work out where we agree, and find a solution in that space

The main challenge in this situation is discovery.? People may not even realise the assumptions they bring into the discussion.? This discovery may turn into a negotiation as each party looks to maximise the prioritisation of their priorities. ? However, often when reasonable people have failed to find a solution it's often because the solution spaces look more like this:

When we begin a process, the stakeholders are not aligned on what an acceptable solution might look like. In fact, they often aren't even aligned as to what the question is!? In cases like this, the role of the process is not only discovery and negotiation.? The process needs to move and enlarge the solution space of each participant in order to create a viable overlapping solution space.? The process needs to change what each participant thinks is an acceptable solution.

The way this practically happens is by creating psychological safety and listening to each other, sharing honestly and listening some more.? As our empathy grows we enlarge our priorities.? We subtly shift our values and create a solution space that wasn't there before. ? This requires deep participatory engagement. It can’t be outsourced or delegated.? You think you are in a participative process to find a good solution but actually you are creating the space for the solution. You begin to realise that you aren't as different as the other participants as you find common ground.? The biggest change that needs to happen, needs to happen in you.? This kind of change doesn't happen fast.?

This kind of change also isn't automatic.? It can fail.? Maybe the value systems are too mutually exclusive.? More likely, bad actors in the process can undermine the psychological safety, acting in bad faith to ensure the solutions space does not grow, or can disengage from the process in order to be able to fight against any emerging answers.??

What does it feel like in an organisation where there is low ALIGNMENT on acceptable solutions?? Often the stakeholders will push the leader to ‘just make a decision’ hoping that the decision will land in their circle, and willing to fight if it does not.? But there is no decision the leader can make that will result in a stable path forward.? The leader needs to have the discipline to push the decision back into the participatory process, forcing the process of enlargement to happen.? And the participants in this process need to avoid the very real temptation to want to outsource the decision to the leadership, in order to escape? the painful process of engagement.

I call this feature ALIGNMENT as a shorthand for the extent to which the viable solution sets overlap.

Feature 2: COMPLEXITY

COMPLEX systems are systems where multiple knock on effects and unintended consequences flow from any change.? Each change causes the other elements within the system to react, making prediction of the system difficult.? Although outcomes can be predicted they tend to be predictions that come with uncertainty such as “a 80% chance of her saying yes” or “30% chance of a 1-1 draw”.? The unintended effects of a change may be much larger than the intended ones.? Weather is complex.? The behaviour of a crowd gathered in a square is complex.? Bees moving round a hive is complex.???

This definition of COMPLEXITY can be contrasted with systems that are COMPLICATED.? COMPLICATED systems might be hard to understand, they are fundamentally causal, and have a solution.? Engineers can understand the interactions of the parts and predict the impact of changes.? This allows for a process that involves a detailed period of gaining understanding (often by experts) and then the logical determination of the solution which can then be rolled out.? A computer chip is complicated.? Making sure a dam will stand up to the water pressure is complicated.? Working out the internal rate of return for a set of future payments without the use of a calculator is complicated. ? (h/t Aaron Dignan for a great explanation of this difference)

It is highly risky to make a big change in a COMPLEX system.? Outcomes are always uncertain because the interactions are impossible to completely predict.? Thus, COMPLEX systems are best changed through tweaks, trials, pilots, and then careful watching of the feedback to see how people respond to incentives.? A big bang approach in a COMPLEX system can lead to system failure that cannot be recovered from. Often the big changes don’t quite work but so much has been changed that it’s hard to work out what is working and what is not. In order to save the change, wise leaders quickly descend into tweaking the ‘big bang’ solution, to enable learning.?

Start-ups seem to spend a lot of time in the COMPLEX space, finding product market fit, shipping minimum viable products into the world to make sure they are learning fast.? ? Successful decisions in COMPLEX systems tend to be small, frequent decisions where the outcomes are tracked and the approach is adjusted.??

I call this feature COMPLEXITY.? Low COMPLEXITY decision contexts may still be COMPLICATED or may be SIMPLE systems

Understanding the map

If we combine COMPLEXITY and ALIGNMENT we get 4 very interesting types of decision making challenges.???

The easiest changes are in non-complex systems with high ALIGNMENT. Changes get harder if the system is COMPLEX or if the ALIGNMENT is low.? And the hardest changes are in COMPLEX systems where the participants arrive with very different views of what an acceptable solution looks like.

So how do we successfully bring change in these different situations?? If it's not a COMPLEX system and is merely complicated (or even simple) We have a reasonable chance of getting to a ‘right’ answer.? If the participants are aligned, then a wise leader or leadership team can set the vision and call everyone to follow. If he picks a good vision that aligns with the group's values, and is a solution to the challenge, he will succeed. This can be a very fast process. If you have an aligned group of stakeholders and the COMPLEXITY is low a TOP DOWN approach can be very effective.? This is block A.

If the values of participants are aligned, but the system is COMPLEX, any decision is inherently risky.? Change in a COMPLEX system will result in multiple interlocking and unpredictable impacts.? The change needs to be chunked up into smaller changes, trialled fast, with an explicit focus on building understanding.? The organisation needs to learn what the knock on effects are, what works and what doesn’t in order to inform the next change.? Although the system is complex, the ALIGNMENT of the stakeholders means that this can still be done by the leader or the leadership team. This TEST AND LEARN process is slower than A but still can be fast and can generate momentum quickly, as the learnings start to build.? This is block B

One of the great advantages of founder led companies is that founders tend to attract people already aligned with them, which means they have the luxury of driving change from block A or B.

Does this mean I do not need to engage the stakeholders if we are generally aligned?? No!? All good change involves stakeholder engagement.? The crucial difference is that they are engaged in order to have their buy-in to the plan, not in order to shift their solution sets.? The solution (or process of TEST & LEARN) is ‘socialised’ with the stakeholders. Even if it is TOP DOWN it needs to be sold to the organisation so that their energy is engaged to make the change succeed.

Where a decision is happening in a context of low ALIGNMENT, any attempt to ‘sell’ a solution to the group will result in unwanted feedback on how to improve the solution.? The participants desire to engage in the solution creation, and they need to! A viable solution space has not yet been created

In a NON-COMPLEX system, a participative process that targets a single decision can succeed.? It may take a long time to get to a solution that everyone is happy (enough) with - Remember we are shifting values here - but at least once the solution is agreed it can be implemented and the organisation can move forward.? The group of stakeholders needs to come together to PARTICIPATE AND DECIDE. This is block C

You guessed it. The final block is COMPLEX systems where the participants have low ALIGNMENT. This is going to require a thorough participative process.? However, due to the COMPLEX nature of the decision context, the initial decision the participative process produces is likely to be wrong.? It will have unintended consequences that mean it will fail to adequately solve the challenge even if it is considered acceptable by the participants. What is needed is a series of PARTICIPATIVE LOOPS, where the stakeholders work together to find acceptable tests/ pilots/ small changes which they then put into action for a specific length of time with a specific objective.? The group then reengages with the results, and adjusts, expands, changes the decisions and then gets the next set of tests going.? This is block D.??

Oh the pain!

For many of you, the process of PARTICIPATIVE LOOPS sounded terrible. It is necessarily slow, and involves a lot of people, many of whom disagree with each other at the outset, bringing different priorities and values and ways of seeing the world. The discussions are likely to be awkward, even abrasive, and initially will make it seem like a solution is impossible (This is a true understanding of the situation at this point!) ? But applying the strategies from any of the other blocks is likely to fail and you will end up reverting to a participative loop process eventually, if there is energy left in the system for change. ? For example, if you kick off a process as if the decision context is NON-COMPLEX when in fact it is COMPLEX and you do a thorough engagement process resulting in a PARTICIPATIVE DECISION, when this decision fails to adequately solve the problem due to unintended consequences, the stakeholders will have lost energy, being exhausted by the engagement. They will lose faith in the process, and be disillusioned as to whether any solution is even possible.? If on the other hand it was made clear that this would be a PARTICIPATIVE LOOP, the decision ‘not working’ would have always been part of the plan, and then the group will have energy to re-engage in the learnings, without losing momentum.???

By identifying up front the nature of the challenge, great leaders and teams design processes that match the COMPLEXITY of the system and ALIGNMENT the stakeholders for the decision they need to make.

Understanding your capacity for change

If PARTICIPATIVE LOOPS seem like hard work then you have understood them. Few organisations can handle doing one of them at a time.? For many types of decision, running organisational loops might take up 80% of the organisational energy. ? For organisations that have multiple pressing issues, or for other reasons lack capacity to engage in the PARTICIPATIVE LOOP required for a block D issue, it would be much better to delay the process rather than trying to solve it with a process doomed to fail.? If the stakeholders can be enrolled, then the organisation may be better off taking the risk of delaying the process until there is organisational bandwidth, rather than starting a process highly likely to fail.? But stakeholders must be enrolled or they will be frustrated with the lack of progress.?

An enrollment process might look something like:?

“This is an important issue with many valid opinions.? We know this is an vital issue for us to deal with as an organisation. Due to the nature of the decision, it is going to require deep engagement for all of us, in order to come up with potential solutions. But, even then the likelihood is that we will need a series of tests to find out exactly how to crack this issue.? The idea will be to run a series of workshops, develop a set of experiments and then evaluate those experiments as a group. We will repeat this process until as a group we feel we have arrived at an answer.? Our proposal is to start this process next January with the aim to get the first experiments in the field in February, so we can reengage in how they are working in March.” ?

Another challenge with Block D processes is that no community is stagnant.? New participants may arrive at the organisation, and find the solutions outside of their solution space.? For the most challenging issues, PARTICIPATIVE LOOPS will be required every time a new batch of stakeholders joins, including a summary of the discussions and learnings so far

Framing control

It doesn't feel great to be in a PARTICIPATIVE LOOP.? It is painful to have one's solution space expanded as one incorporates other points of view.? It can also feel out of control.? It’s not easy to make changes which are likely to fail.? One can feel like one is fumbling in the dark, and the community may be crying out for decisive leadership.? Because of this it can be helpful to frame what control and mastery look like in a PARTICIPATIVE LOOP.? Control means being in control of the process, not in control of the outcome.? And mastery means becoming good at the process: Good at listening. Good and designing experiments. Good at learning from them.? Nevertheless it is going to take strong leadership to resist the temptation to ‘just decide’ and to keep the space where the engagements happen psychologically safe.? Decisive leadership is firmly leading the organisation through a process that has a chance of achieving a workable solution.

What kind of challenge are you facing?

Have a think about the challenges that your organisation faces.? Perhaps you are deciding what to do about work flexibility? Or vaccination policy?? Or transformation?? Are the systems that you are dealing with complex or merely complicated?? What about the stakeholders? On these issues are the participants aligned in their values and priorities? Do you think a solution currently exists that would be acceptable to all stakeholders?? Do they thoroughly understand and appreciate the different views on the issue within their own organisation?

For each of your major decisions identify which quadrant they are in.? Then decide on the process you are going to use to crack the decision.

At least if you know up front what the process entails you can frame the challenge and make sure everyone is up for going on the journey.? Great leaders know that if they are intentional about the process they give themselves the best chance of finding workable solutions to their most impossible problems.