by Roger Martin | 12:00 PM October 4, 2013
The collective belief that complexity is on the rise is largely an illusion. We’ve inflicted it on ourselves by our primary method of dealing with the complexity that has always been an inherent part of our world. As I’ve argued previously, we attack dynamic complexity by minimizing detail complexity, and thus divide the world into numerous deep knowledge domains – which in turn generates a disquieting level of inter-domain complexity.
This of course begs the question: is this self-inflicted inter-domain complexity a problem? Should we be worried about it?
Because we are notably bad at dealing productively with the inter-domain complexity that we have created, I think it is indeed a problem. Ironically, we are crummy at dealing with it because of the predominance of narrow knowledge siloes – which are of course the self-same knowledge siloes that created the inter-domain complexity in the first place. Kafka would be impressed!
Inter-domain complexity challenges us whenever a hospital patient has co-morbidities (heart and liver problems for example), or a business problem spans marketing and finance, or a political problem bridges foreign relations and domestic economics. The specialists who focus on heart, liver, marketing, finance, foreign relations, and domestic economy frame the problems using their tools, models, and language systems because that is what they know and that is where their confidence lies. It is hard for them to un-frame what they have framed or un-see what they see.
It is not impossible. It is just hard. Typically, every bit of their formal and informal education has taught them to sacrifice detail complexity – to narrow problems to facilitate analyzing them. They don’t actually know how to take two opposing frames, models, and diagnoses, and do something useful with them. In fact, the more expert they are, the less likely they are to ever have done so – even once in their life. So they stick assiduously to something at which they are terrifically good: being narrow, and confidently so.
Furthermore, they tend not to suffer any personal downside from taking a narrow perspective. The heart surgeon doesn’t get blamed if the patient’s liver failed due to the stress of surgery. The marketing executive doesn’t get blamed if the finance executive failed to come up with the capital necessary to fulfill the marketing executive’s grand plans.
Net, there is little training and few rewards for dealing productively with inter-domain complexity.
Were there no heart, liver, marketing, finance, foreign relations, or domestic economy experts, we wouldn’t face inter-domain complexity or the associated problems. However, we would face lots of detail and dynamic complexity. The world is not entirely crazy. There is a reason to specialize in order to try to cut into dynamic complexity, to try to tease out cause and effect relationships and advance our knowledge in various domains.
The key, as with so many things in life, is to get beyond either/or. To move our understanding of the world forward, we need to tackle both detail complexity and dynamic complexity. We don’t want to operate with one gigantic knowledge domain in which our ability to advance knowledge is ponderously slow. But by the same token, we don’t want innumerable knowledge domains that slice and dice our world into such little and incompatible pieces that we advance knowledge that isn’t really powerful for our lives.
I believe that the solution to the self-inflicted problem of inter-domain complexity is the development of a meta-domain: the domain of knowledge about how to integrate across knowledge domains. While this might seem on its face to be an esoteric or even unapproachable knowledge domain, it really isn’t either. There are techniques for tackling fully clashing models from different knowledge domains.
More importantly, these techniques can be taught, though masters of individual knowledge domains tend to fight against the notion that anybody not steeped in their frames, models, and tools can deal with their domain in any useful way.
Perhaps most excitingly, these techniques for dealing productively with inter-domain complexity can be taught to children. In our I-Think initiative at the Rotman School, we’re teaching even elementary school children how to wade confidently into and resolve inter-domain conflicts.
These young people have a blessed characteristic not shared by their adult counterparts: they don’t think what they are doing is strange; they think it is just plain sensible. If we train enough of them, I think we’ll see many positive changes in the years to come. Among them will be a common sense that complexity is dropping, not rising.
This post is part of a series of perspectives leading up to the fifth annual Global Drucker Forum in November 2013 in Vienna, Austria. For more on the theme of the event, Managing Complexity, and information on how to attend, see the Forum’s website.
ROGER MARTIN
Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Premier’s Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness and Academic Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the co-author ofPlaying to Win: How Strategy Really Works and of the Playing to Win Strategy Toolkit. For more information, including events with Roger, click here.
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