Leveraging Complex Change
We help you understand the nature of complex change and build capacity to move forward when you can neither predict nor control the future.
In our ectronically networked world, change is constant.
Everything from day-to-day experiences to global upheaval touches our lives and brings new challenges and opportunities. How do you cope in a world where it sometimes feels like there’s nothing you can count on—except change?
Emerging patterns
Change happens. Sometimes it is simple and clean, but most often it is turbulent and messy because it emerges from the complex nature of the world.
More recently, scientists, researchers, and practitioners have learned more about the complex nature of life. Because of their work, we’re better able to talk about the differences between the traditional understanding of change and the reality of complex change.
What is the nature of complex change?
When the world around us changes at the speed of thought, this understanding of change helps us move forward and find our best fit in each new moment.
Most of us intuitively recognize the characteristics of complex change in our lives, but we don’t always know how to respond.
Using the characteristics of change, we cab respond more effectively and with greater confidence.
Five patterns to cope with the complex change
Complex change is messy. It’s also frustrating and surprising and joyful! These five patterns of action and decision making will help you cope with the mess.
Stand in Inquiry
In the uncertainty of complex change, I rely on the Inquiry practices that we include in our HSD Simple Rules:
♦ Turn judgment into curiosity
♦ Turn disagreement into shared exploration
♦ Turn defensiveness into self-reflection
♦ Turn assumptions into questions
See patterns that matter
Our world changes constantly, bringing new ideas, challenges, opportunities, irritations, and celebrations. This emergent nature of complex change creates a sense of overwhelm, sometimes, with so much coming at us at one time and continuously over time.
What if we try to remember that it can’t all matter all the time and stop to consider what really matters right now? Are you playing in the weeds when the trees are falling all around you? Or is this a time when the trees can take care of themselves, and you need to pull a few weeds?
Consider the beyond
When changes in our broader world have an impact on us, we can waste energy on fixing or shifting to manage what is right in front of us. On the other hand, we can look beyond the immediate to understand more about forces and events that shape our current reality.
You cannot step into the same river twice
The world being perpetually unique and it challenges us me to think we know what to expect, and then that’s not what happens at all. Each of us carries with them a culmination of experiences, learning, impressions, and observations from their entire history - it shapes our perspectives and our choices. Those choices, however, bring us new experiences and learning, and we are no longer the same person we were before.
Leverage connections
Human systems are interconnected. What we do has an impact on others, and their actions influence our world. What happens half-way around the globe can change our experience in ways we cannot imagine.
Because our world is interconnected, we cannot predict what might happen in the next instant. It’s impossible to know what we need to know without making connections that help us access information, resources, and support. We collaborate across silos. We seek new ideas and perspectives. We engage others through questions.
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
— John F. Kennedy