ISSUE #030 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
Last night, I woke up with a pain in my stomach.
Not the kind where you roll over, blame dinner, and go back to sleep.
This one stayed.
It ran through my upper abdomen and into my back. I shifted around. I got up. I lay back down. I tried to decide whether it was serious or whether I was being dramatic, which according to Kathryn, is not always a decision I am qualified to make on my own.
It was a long night.
By morning, the pain had eased enough that I felt somewhat better. Better is a dangerous word sometimes. It can mean the problem is passing.
It can also mean the problem has temporarily stopped yelling.
After some research and a phone call with a medical friend across the country, I made the decision to go to the emergency room at Enloe Health.
Several hours, tests, scans, conversations, and one very clear image later, I learned that I had a gallstone roughly the size of a golf ball.
Apparently, when they compare something inside your body to sporting equipment, the day is not headed in the direction you expected.
I was told I needed surgery.
Not next month.
Not after I cleared my calendar.
Today.
And just like that, complexity stopped being the topic I was researching and became the situation I was living.
This is the third issue in our series on VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.
I had already been working through how to explain complexity in a way that was useful and didn’t require you to earn a degree in systems theory before reaching the end of the article.
Here is the cleanest way I know to say it:
Complexity is not simply having a lot of things to manage.
Complexity is what happens when the different parts begin affecting one another.
Take a company with five employees.
You have five people, but you also have ten possible one-to-one relationships between them.
Grow to ten employees and you have not simply added five people.
You have multiplied the one-on-one possible relationships to forty-five.
That means more communication, more handoffs, more expectations, more personalities, more interpretations, and more places where information can either travel well or go to die.
The new employees also may affect clients, projects, schedules, culture, cash flow, workload, and the decisions other employees make.
You did not just add another few items to the system, you changed the system.
That is complexity.
We often use complicated and complex as though they mean the same thing, but they don’t.
A piece of machinery can be extremely complicated. It may have thousands of parts and require someone with deep expertise to understand it.
But the parts generally behave according to established rules. When something breaks, an expert can examine the machine, locate the failure, replace the part, and reasonably expect it to work again.
A company is different.
You can replace a process, hire a new person, change the compensation plan, move someone into management, or introduce a new piece of software…and discover that the result is nothing like what you expected.
People react. They interpret, adapt and compensate for one another.
They misunderstand what you thought you explained perfectly.
One change creates another change, which creates another, and eventually someone is sitting in your office asking how a software update caused two employees to stop speaking to each other.
That is not a mechanical problem.
That is a complex system doing what complex systems do.
Yesterday, my life already had plenty of moving parts.
Kathryn and I run two companies. There are employees, clients, projects, decisions, family responsibilities, friends, church commitments, and the usual collection of things that seem determined to arrive at the same time.
Then one sizable gallstone entered the picture.
It did not simply add “surgery” to my calendar.
It affected where Kathryn needed to be.
It affected what our employees needed to know.
It affected meetings, client work, decisions, communication, meals, transportation, recovery, and whatever we thought we were doing over the next several days.
One event touched nearly every other part of the system.
The surgery itself may be “routine” but the effect it has on everything around us is complexity.
I had intended to take this article further today.
But there has been a small change in plans.
Hello. Kathryn here.
I am Michael’s wife, business partner, occasional editor, and, as of today, the person who gets to finish his newsletter while he has an organ removed.
Nothing says “working together in business and in life” quite like being handed the Complexity article from a hospital room.
Michael began this piece yesterday by trying to define complexity.
Today, I watched it happen.
A single medical decision reorganized two businesses and the lives of several people in a matter of hours.
Texts started flying. Calendars changed. Responsibilities shifted. People stepped in. Decisions that seemed important yesterday suddenly became less important, and a few decisions we never expected to make became the only ones that mattered.
What struck me is that reducing complexity in a moment like this does not mean solving everything.
It means deciding what matters right now.
Today, that means Michael’s health.
It means making sure the businesses are stable enough.
It means communicating clearly, trusting good people, letting some things wait, and resisting the urge to make a color-coded spreadsheet for every possible post-surgery scenario.
That last one may be directed at me.
When complexity increases quickly, leaders often try to keep everything operating exactly as it did before.
That sounds responsible, but usually is not possible.
Something changed. The system has been disrupted. Pretending otherwise only spreads your attention thinner and increases the likelihood that you will make poor decisions everywhere at once.
The priority is stabilization.
What absolutely must continue?
What can stop?
What decisions need to be made now?
What decisions should wait until you have better information?
Who needs the authority to move without you?
That last question can be uncomfortable for leaders, especially when we have trained everyone around us to bring every significant decision back to us.
But if one unexpected event can stop the company because you are temporarily unavailable, the problem is not only the unexpected event.
The system was already carrying more dependency than it should.
There is more to unpack here, including why growing companies become complex so quickly and how leaders can simplify without stripping away what the business needs to function...but those are topics for another issue!
An emergency can make complexity suddenly visible, but most complexity does not arrive in an ambulance. It accumulates quietly through growth, new employees, added services, changing responsibilities, and decisions layered on top of earlier decisions.
Michael will be back. The immediate disruption will pass. But life and business will still be complex. He may decide to pick that up in the next issue.
For today, we’re going to take our own advice and stop before the article about complexity becomes unnecessarily complicated.
We also want to give a sincere shout-out to the team at Enloe Health.
From the emergency room through testing, diagnosis, preparation, and surgery, Michael has received exceptional care.
Every person we encountered was kind, communicative, attentive, and deeply competent. On a day that shifted quickly and contained more than a little uncertainty, their care gave us confidence that Michael was exactly where he needed to be.
We are profoundly grateful.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael, and for today, Kathryn