Adaptable

Roadmaps are frequently used to remove uncertainty. However, relying on traditional roadmaps in complex situations creates a fallacy. A big issue is that they don’t take the element of surprise into account.

One differentiator between being good at managing complexity and uncertainty, and being bad at it is strategy. Unfortunately people’s common perception of strategy is simplistic and misleading.

In this episode I elaborate on some misconceptions, strategy’s main purpose and how to practice strategy.

Working in complex situations creates lots of ambiguity and room for interpretation. Because of this people tend to become puzzled, confused or stuck. When working with uncertainty you can still find options that are reasonable and useful in the specific context. In this episode I talk about some principles and practical tools that are helpful to make sense of and act in complexity.

Complex situations makes it challenging to become a leader that’s appreciated. People and situations within an organisation set a diverse set of expectations on leadership. I’ve noticed that people who repeatedly provide appreciated and appropriate leadership share some common traits that distinguish them from other leaders.

Besides sharing these traits I also share the most basic and useful framing of what leadership entails, that I’ve come across.

All organisations, teams and leaders have the same goal; to build something that’s successful. In our experience none of them have found the path to success either strait or obvious. Far from all have reached the level of success they aimed for. We’ve found that having Empowered Product Teams have greatly increased the chances for an organisation to meet user needs and deliver business value.

In this episode we go through:

• What a product team is and isn’t, what they’re about and their purpose.
• When it’s most relevant to have them and how to make best use of them.
• Some of the condition to set them up for success.

Some of the resources we use in our work and in this episode:

As a leader in a complex business context one of your key interests should be to improve the performance of the people you lead. Recent research has found that becoming an inclusive leader directly impact peoples performance. It has also identified a number of traits connected with the capability of Inclusive Leadership. We go through each trait and look at how they can be applied in practise with a few concrete examples.

Our sources for the research and traits can be found in the following articles:

All organisations today have adopted the concept and practice of working in teams. That's the way you work, otherwise you're doing something wrong. At the same time not enough organisations create the conditions necessary to optimise for teams to become productive. Instead they unknowingly foster conditions that creates obstacles for teams. We elaborate on the most common fallacies and pitfall we've seen. We also share some tools that can be used to mitigate and shift towards more appropriate conditions.

How do you manage in complexity? What does it mean when a situation or context is complex? Why should you care?

Organisations and leaders that are Complexity Conscious has an increased ability to early identify paths that will lead to desired effects and those that will lead to dead ends or harm. We share some real-world examples that has helped to increase our and others consciousness around complexity.

The following sources have increased our language and toolbox within this field. We highly recommend taking a deeper look.