Beyond Complexity
Thinking about Intelligence
It’s time that the agile community moves beyond thinking just about complexity. It’s time we start thinking about intelligence.
Over the past decades people interested in helping teams and organisations succeed have developed the agile community. With its origins in Scrum, Toyota Manufacturing and the Agile Manifesto, this community has been finding its way into the hearts of teams and the wallets of leadership. It’s not just about software teams, although lots of the important thinking does come from the world of technology where moving fast is a competitive advantage.
At the heart of agility is a diagnosis worth paying attention to. The world is complex. Many of the problems we face at work are therefore complex. The many moving parts interacting with each other create a world which is possible to navigate but impossible to predict.
Agilists see the world in its inherent complexity and know that the only way to really navigate this is one bit at a time. Build something small, test it, adapt. Experiment with a new way of working, seek feedback from the environment, pivot or persist depending on what you learn. In this world of work we optimise for learning about the environment over trying to control it.
Recently its seems the agile world is thinking more and more about complexity as the holy grail for keeping itself relevant. In the agile communities in which I find myself there is endless talk about the nature of complexity and how that applies to our organisations. I’m in favour of this! Complexity is real, studying it is important, applying those findings will help our organisations and teams.
I would summarise the general approach as ‘the world is complex, try to understand complexity and adapt yourself and your organisation to it’.
The problem is however when we think about applying complexity practically, before long you’re up to your neck in detailed and technical yet abstract terminology and lots of room for misunderstanding. To be clear, I love this talk. It’s nerdy and interesting and generalises well, but I don’t think it’s going to be the holy grail that our community and the people who work with us need.
This is for two main reasons:
Whereas we might nerd out about the difference between an attractor and an enabling constraint, I struggle to imagine that your average CEO or CTO cares that much. We need to go to people where they are not where we are.
Tools for handling complexity are being developed as we speak, but complexity is abstract, and the problems people are dealing with are concrete. This makes it hard for us to make complexity and its tools relevant to people.
Those are opinions, I’m happy to be proven wrong with them but this is my starting point. Until that moment however, I believe it’s time for the next phase. It’s time to think about intelligence.
Why intelligence?
Intelligence is nature’s way of responding to complexity. In a world full of infinite data and possibilities, intelligence is the quality that enables an organism to exist.
Intelligence helps us find relevant and meaningful patterns in our sensory world, distinguishing a tasty apple from a teeth-breaking rock. Intelligence helps us solve the puzzles we need to survive. Intelligence is what allows us to navigate complex social dynamics and be part of a tribe. Whereas the environment is complex, we are intelligent.
Human intelligence is innate, we would die without it. Organisational intelligence however is not. Whereas remote tribes and ancient religions have had millenia to develop ways to be intelligent as a group and survive, the modern corporation is only 150 years old (I made this up). The way that we come together in groups to solve problems hasn’t had long to evolve, and I’m pretty sure we can all think of examples of organisational stupidity in our careers.
So my next phase goes like this ‘we are intelligent inherently, and our organisations need to be intelligent to survive. Let’s study intelligence and learn how to unlock it in ourselves and our teams and organisations’.
The study of intelligence is called Cognitive Science. It is an interdisciplinary field drawing from Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, trying to make sense of how we make sense of the world. We are living through a renaissance of Cognitive Science, as these separate fields coalesce and learn from each other about what makes us intelligent.
Agile On The Mind is my attempt to take the relevant, interesting and usable insights from Cognitive Science and work out how to practically bring them to our teams and organisations. It’s new and I’m learning as I go, but I hope to bring the language and thinking of Cognitive Science into our day to day. I don’t want to replace complexity thinking, but I want to bring it to life for thinkers and practitioners.
I’m going to try to post something about once a fortnight as I find out about things worth writing. If I say something you like, tell me. If I say something you don’t like, definitely tell me. I want this community to be the starting point for the whole future of the world of work. Nothing more, nothing less.
For older posts, check out agileonthemind.blogspot.com
