I have got to be honest when I say that this past week’s
reading was quite possibly the most interesting reading I have done in the
curriculum to date. I have heard about
some of the topics discussed through my engineering but never really looked
into any of the topics, except for maybe quantum mechanics. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about complexity
theory and chaos mathematics – I will definitely do more reading on the
subjects once I get done with this curriculum.
What I
find the most interesting about complexity science is that while I have never
been taught anything about them, I have witnessed them constantly without knowing
it. Complexity fundamentals like
inter-relatedness, emergence, and adaptability are things that I have
personally experienced in the Navy. One
of the things that the fellow junior officers will stress to new ones first
reporting aboard is that they should spread out and meet the crew as fast as
possible. While some of the reasoning
behind this is to start the process of building trust in the crew and vice
versa, it also helps build your network of knowledge for future use. Building this network means that you can find
the solution to a question by going to the correct person without having to
waste time looking for the right person that has the answer. As with other things, it also means that the
crew knows when they can go to you for information also. The type of inter-relatedness is exactly what
complexity science is describing. Going
beyond the boat, as people transfer off, your network of knowledge spreads to
other ports and boats for future use. I
think this is one of the reasons the submarine community is so close – you do
not need 7 degrees of separation to get from 1 person to any other person in
the fleet, often all you need is one, maybe two links. As a result, you can pretty much access any
person in the fleet and their wealth of knowledge pretty quickly and going back
to my previous blog, knowledge is power.
Going
back to finding the right person with the answer, JOs are often tasked with
finding out solutions to problems by superiors.
The JO should formulate the answer before verifying, but the bottom line
is that solutions are usually conjured up at the lower levels of the
organization, thus they emerge to the higher ups. This emergence is another defining factor of
a complex system. While the strict hierarchal
structure of the Navy means that I haven’t necessarily witnessed
self-organization first hand, considering I have seen the other 3, I can only
assume that the other exists, but I can think of an example I have been exposed
to. My study of high performance teams
leads me to say that they are just the product of self-organization in a
complex system due to the fact that leaders often emerge from the team vice
being specifically appointed.
The
butterfly effect is another incredible observation to show both how complex the
world really is and how little we truly understand about it. Thinking back to large impacts I have
witnessed that were magnitudes larger than the change that started them, one
pretty quickly comes to mind. Coming out
of the yards, my ship was running into trouble with procedural compliance. While the current CO stressed using the
books, he didn’t really do much about it.
When the new CO came in, he also said we were going back to the basics
and the books, but this time he actually did something about it – he got the
other officers and chiefs on board with the message. While not necessarily a ground breaking
change, the realignment in the way we thought filtered through to almost every
aspect of how we operated the ship.
Because of 2 words – procedural compliance – we went from being an
almost dysfunctional crew to the best strategic asset in the fleet in only 2
years. Again, this wasn’t a ground
breaking program or even a new idea, it was a realignment in the fundamental
way we did business that had profound effects on the boat’s ability. Other than that, I can’t really think of any
small changes that had large impacts.
With
respect to complexity theory and its impact on an organization’s resources, I
think one important thing to keep in mind is that while we think we understand
supply and demand; that system is incredibly complex and we might not know as
much as we think. There are complex
equations and statistics to attempt to model how supply and demand are effected
by one another, but way too often the economists are wrong and the system
responds differently than predicted.
Manpower is another resource for organizations. Humans are exactly what make an organization
a complex one – by embracing the complex nature of them, you can reap the
benefits of it (i.e. if you encourage the things that make an system complex
like self-organization, inter-relatedness, emergence, and adaptability, you
will create a better organization due to the benefits associated with each like
a more knowledgeable and networked staff that solves problems at their
level).
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