One of the most highly prized skills these days is problem solving. Being known as a problem solver is an almost surefire way to guarantee success in whatever organisation you are in. As the great Vanilla Ice once said - "If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it". Mind you, he did also say "Word to your mother" which is somewhat less profound. Problem solving is indeed a very valuable thing, but at the same time a very limited one. Problem solving implies finding the root cause of an issue and solving it - making sure that it doesn't occur again. But what happens when the root cause of a problem isn't something that can be fixed?

Many of the problems that confront organisations (and society as a whole) these days are not problems where you can look at the problem, see the root cause and fix the system so the problem goes away. Many of the key problems we face are caused not by an easily fixed flaw in the system, but by the system itself. They aren't really problems at all but behaviour that emerges from the operation of the system. What I'm talking about, of course, is complexity. When a system behaves in a complex way, it exhibits unexpected behaviour and we see that as a problem. But you can’t just go in and fix a complex system. Any fix you make will itself have unexpected consequences. Complex problems can't be fixed. At least not in the conventional sense of finding a root cause and applying a discreet solution. What do problem solvers do when confronted by complexity?

Last time we looked at some of the challenges around organisational change and the need to flip the system from one attractor to another. But where does that leave us? We know organisational change is hard. We know that we need to change the state of the system. We know that traditional approaches run out of steam and the system settles back to where it was before (often after thrashing wildly). We know we still want to change organisations. But how? How should we be doing organisational change?

Traditional approaches fail for a few reasons - they try to do a massive change all at once but don't add enough energy to push the system into a new state, or they add so much energy that the system breaks completely and descends into chaos, or they go the other way and try to do a low energy change but they can't sustain for long enough and they don't manage to shift the system. So what do we do?