Unraveling Uncertainty and Complexity

I’d love to give the mapping activities a go.

The Uncertainty Project:

• Organisations are complex adaptive systems made up of autonomous agents that are interconnected and whose behaviours emerge from their independent decisions.
• Competing drivers that influence agents’ behaviours, like productivity and profitability goals, can push agents in different directions and create trade-offs.
• Uncertainty arises from unpredictable events and outcomes due to a lack of understanding of causes and effects.
• Complexity arises from a large number of interconnected elements, making it difficult to understand cause and effect. Greater complexity leads to more uncertainty.
• Complexity in organisations can come from competing drivers, external noise, and internal events.
• External noise from the environment, like increased amount and frequency of outside influences, can shake the system and increase complexity.
• Internal events from agents’ actions can ripple through the system and create emergent behaviours.
• Capturing and sharing beliefs about external noise can build shared understanding to calibrate drivers and set strategic direction.
• Prioritising with even-over statements can clarify the relative importance of competing drivers to reduce misalignment.
• Taking an outside view (e.g. Customer-centricity) and learning from others can reduce complexity and uncertainty.

UPDATE: This was linked to from the original and is definitely worth a read: 3 simple steps to find the causes of complexity and reduce uncertainty.