Working Notes of a Practising Neo-Generalist (#21)?—?An artful explanation of the complicated and complex
“If anyone can refute me — show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective — I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” — Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book 6:21 (Gregory Hays, The Modern Library, New York)
Picture above: “In [Eva] Hesse’s last piece, which she referred to as the ‘rope piece,’ knots are places of disconnection and of made connections; one could say these joinings are places of weakness. But that depends on whether one sees these knots as joining for the first time, or as a kind of repair. Hesse’s knots can only be both,” Anne Michaels writes in Infinite Gradation — Rope Piece, by Eva Hesse (1970, Whitney Museum of American Art)
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An artful explanation of the complicated and complex
Today’s complexity forces us to live in multiple worlds at the same time — one characterized by ‘either/or’ thinking, the other by an ambiguous ‘both/and.’ The first traditional and familiar, the latter paradoxical and alien to most of today’s business and, of course, also political leaders.
The best way to make these differences clear, is by putting Piet Mondriaan’s ‘Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue’ (1921) next to Jackson Pollock’s ‘Number 14: Gray’ (1948). (By the way, this isn’t about which painting or artist you prefer. They are a metaphor for the crucial differences between complicated and complex.)
Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue, by Piet Mondriaan (1921).
Now try to find a single straight line or a central focal point in the painting by Pollock. You simply won’t. But it has numerous possibilities to ‘connect the dots’ — one seemingly just as good as the other. There is only one way to find out what works best: explore and experiment. It is also, as Charles Handy says in his speech at the 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum (2013), “unmanageable.” So what better way to describe the complex and interconnected environment in which companies and their leaders operate and compete? But through a lack of understanding how complexity works, most business leaders continue to ‘solve’ complex puzzles by framing them as a beautiful Mondriaan painting.
Number 14: Gray, by Jackson Pollock (1948).
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“The ability to think past either/or situations is the foundation of critical thinking, but still, it requires courage. Getting curious and asking questions happens outside our bunkers of certainty.” — Brené Brown in Braving the Wilderness