Learning to Navigate Complexity

Some of that approach predates my business career.

As an Environmental Design student at Texas A&M, I was introduced to James Adams’s Conceptual Blockbusting, a book about recognizing the barriers that get in the way of creative problem solving. It didn’t teach me to think that way so much as give me a framework for something I was already inclined to do: question assumptions, look at problems from different angles and resist accepting the first apparent solution as the only one.

Architecture ultimately wasn’t my path. The way of thinking stuck.

Much of my early career was spent in public policy and regulated industries, where problems rarely have a single constituency, an obvious solution or even a universally agreed definition.

That work reinforced the importance of appreciating a problem before trying to solve it. Understand the people involved. Identify the interests, assumptions and constraints shaping their decisions. Then look at the problem from enough different angles to see possibilities that may not be immediately apparent.

Sometimes the answer is consensus. Sometimes it’s a different strategy, a new organization or an unconventional combination of people and resources. Sometimes the most useful first step is questioning whether the problem has been framed correctly in the first place.

The objective isn’t novelty. It’s finding something that works.

From Advising to Operating

There is a meaningful difference between recommending a course of action and being responsible for what happens next.

Moving from public affairs into entrepreneurship and operating businesses added a different dimension to the work. Strategy eventually has to become execution. Ideas have to survive contact with customers, employees, regulations, budgets, production schedules and markets.

Operating also changed the way I thought about problems I’d previously encountered as an advisor. Policy looks different when you’re responsible for making payroll. A sales strategy looks different when inventory isn’t moving. An organizational problem looks different when the people involved are looking to you for a decision.

Analysis matters. So does imagination. But eventually you have to make the call, commit the resources and own the result.

Building What Comes Next

I’ve had opportunities to build organizations from the beginning, help other people build theirs, and assume responsibility for organizations with established histories and identities.

Each requires something different.

Starting with a blank sheet of paper allows you to ask what should exist. Working with an established organization requires first understanding what already does—its people, culture, strengths, weaknesses and the reasons it became what it is.

The temptation is to arrive with answers. I’ve generally found it more useful to arrive with questions.

What is actually working? What isn’t? What matters most? Which constraints are real and which are assumptions? What resources are already available but underused? Who needs to be part of the solution? What does success actually look like?

The answer may be to build something new. It may be to connect things that already exist, simplify something unnecessarily complicated, change direction, preserve something valuable—or stop doing something that no longer makes sense.

Different circumstances require different answers.

What interests me most is figuring out which one fits.