In a complex, fast-changing world situational awareness and the ability to understand context in decision-making is all important. A few years back I described an approach to problem definition (originally from education) based on three fundamentally different types of contexts: simple, complicated, and complex. And I was reminded of just how critical this is only recently.
Simple problems are generally known knowns. Challenges or situations where you have experience and existing knowledge, or where the problem is well understood. Here the response should draw on that existing knowledge and ensure that process and execution can deliver the same outcome. This is the domain of checklists, best practice, ensuring compliance with existing processes. It is the domain of minimising wastage, optimising efficiencies, and ensuring that unnecessary risks are avoided. It’s like following a recipe – as long as you follow the same steps every time you can expect the same outcome. So manufacturers use Lean techniques to identify anomalies from the norm. Pilots and cockpit crews (and now operating theatre staff) do checklists because failure is not an option.
Complicated problems however have way more variables. This is more likely to be characterised by known unknowns. We can likely turn the unknowns into knowns through analysis. It is therefore the domain of experience (we’ve done this before and are aware of what we don’t know or how we can learn) and expertise. It’s like sending a rocket to the moon because it may be a very difficult thing to do but the fact that we’ve done it before helps us to solve the problem better next time.
Complex adaptive, or ‘wicked’ problems however, are characterised by many independent variables which in themselves are interrelated and perhaps changing rapidly. It’s more likely to be a new challenge, or where new thinking or innovation is required and so we’re dealing with potentially a lot of unknown unknowns. We don’t know what we don’t know. We likely don’t know what the right solution is at the outset. So the only response to this is emergent. You need to test and learn, experiment, try things out in a ‘safe to fail’ way, learn and adapt as you go. It’s like raising a child because this too is full of unknown unknowns – just because you’ve raised one child successfully doesn’t mean that you can do the same again with a second child.
The importance of context and understanding your problem domains is lost on many businesses. And if they consider context at all many leaders misdiagnose complex problems and situations as complicated ones, deploying the wrong approaches and techniques (often linear instead of adaptive) to navigate the situation and find a solution.
To better define the problem domain try asking these simple questions:
- Predictability: Is this a situation that we’ve faced before? How much do you know about the problem/challenge? Can we predict the outcome or solution?
- Newness: Will the main benefit come from optimising well established techniques/processes/propositions or innovating new ones?
- Variability: How many independent variables characterise the situation? Are these variables changing rapidly?
This, at least, helps you to define the type of approach that is going to be optimal for finding and deploying a solution.
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