Glacial complexity in corporations rarely manifests itself bluntly. At first, it is just conversations, nothing more. A call here, a call there. Maybe one more meeting. An escalation happening slightly earlier than expected. An increase in reporting cadence: more control – to not let things slip. Budget ownership, suddenly redefined, now a precautionary measure. Nothing dramatic has happened. And yet here they are: the symptoms of a system whose internal structures have outrun the mechanics to steer it.
An ownership problem appears in production and is involuntarily repurposed as misalignment. A system boundary got lost somewhere and reappears in IT as a technical issue, or possibly as architecture debt. The tighter grip of control shows up moments later as the latest transparency initiative. Lead times rise on the customer-facing side of the corporation, even though KPIs are fine. Then the least-performing division gets singled out because it had the most visible surface area or the lowest tipping point threshold. Not necessarily because it created the problem. However, this is where it manifests itself.
The organizational reflex is regularly a mixture of local treatment and top-down planning. If the symptom appears in IT, the Head of IT is called. If it shows up as a change in operational lead times, the Inventory Manager has to stand up to it. If both approaches fail, increase the information density flow to the managerial level. Interestingly, each intervention may be functional within its own reference frame. The difficulty is that the fixed reference frame is, more often than not, part of the problem.
The local treatment fails; the stream of information gets pushed upward by design.
Dependencies, exceptions, explanations, local optimizations, defensive narratives, and well-intended initiatives are now all converging directly at the managerial level as a giant hodgepodge of variables in the seven-digit domain. The managerial layer is then asked, or brings itself into a position, to absorb a seven-digit amount of elements with a two-digit number of people, who themselves can only handle a three-digit amount of meaningful distinctions before judgment completely collapses. But one cannot negotiate with complexity, so what happens?
The ceremonial answer is to create another governance layer and a plan.
The plan, including corprate objectives, is rarely consulted and lives out its life in a slide-deck on some server. Information stalemate follows and the first reflex is to fall back on legacy workarounds that were working earlier. Somewhat.
The alternative is a full stop.
This assertion obviously requires explanation. What is not meant is to stop work. What is meant is to stop the reflex of increasing command-and-control. Instead, consider observing the observers first.
Which dependencies do exist? Which contradictions within the system are neutralized by people at regular intervals? Why is there no single correct view to frame the issues? Why do some problems behave like symptoms of other problems?
The purpose of this observation of the second order is not an academic one. Following directly from the origins of complexity management, it is the restoration of controllability and the capacity to intervene successfully. Once system boundaries are redrawn, once the signal is disconnected from the noise, once the relevant parameters of the system are being dug up, the equation changes. Something in the system must change.
It started with: Who owns the symptom?
It becomes: why is the system doing what it does at an increasing rate and what needs to change for it to reach a desired state?