Part 6: Understanding how it all comes together
We shift from a focus on the why to the how, offering practical tools and methods to respond to common complex systems issues in organisations.
The sixth part of the book focuses on operationalising strategies for improvement in a complex environments, where direct cause and effect relationships are often weak or impossible to detect except in retrospect.
Part 6 will include descriptions and implementation guides for five tools:
21. Modality of uncertainty assessment
There are four basic modalities of uncertainty that have distinct strategies for goal-setting and prediction, ranging from the most stable to the most unpredictable environments where no amount of time spent information gathering would be able reduce analytical uncertainty.
This tool helps people to estimate their likely level of uncertainty and identify the available strategies to effectively manage it.
22. Sentinel event reporting
Sentinel events are a proven way to set hard boundaries around acceptable outcomes and to implement blame-free strategies for preventing them. Historically they are used in health settings, but have utility in any environment where long-term institutional trust requires zero tolerance for certain outcomes. This is not merely an inspirational goal; there must be a commitment and plausible pathway for sentinal events to be “wholly preventable”.
23. Ruin-proof strategy mapping
In contrast to sentinel events, the goal of ruin-proofing is not risk elimination but a calibrated exposure to risk to maximise survival chances in the face of unexpected or adverse events, managed through a five stage process of mapping out tolerance, identification, quantification, treatment, and observation of potentially ruinous events.
24. Change champion catalysis (C3) framework
The importance of change champions to effective change is widely recognised, but it is rarer that people understand their role from a systems perspective. The framework designs effective change champions by specifying three key roles: to absorb switching costs, disrupt routines, and engineer transitions. These tasks catalyse action by specifically identifying and explicitly addressing factors arising from four common barriers to change — team satisficing, path dependence, internal optimisation, and collective action concerns.
25. Adopting best practice complex change strategies
The final tool builds upon the recognition that complex change is sustainable when it focuses on system health, direction, and implementation of positive expected value (+EV) strategies. It provides a framework for identifying useful trend data relevant to root cause behaviour, shifts in intent and sentiment, confirmation of positive emergent behaviours, and achievement of “tipping points”, recognisable as jumps in outcome to stable statistical patterns.