Building Capacity to Handle Complexity - Part I
A playbook to help you train to handle any complexity that comes your way
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Place one lotus leaf on a pond and everything is fine. By day 2, the leaves have doubled.
By day 29, the pond still looks half full and is quite manageable.
However, on day 30, the pond is fully choked, struggling, and maxed out its capacity.
Unless there is a system that helps the lily pond digest the complexity, then, it will be overwhelmed and collapse.
Suppose you own a small bakery business.
At the beginning, you bake 20 bread in one oven. If some of it gets burnt, you can easily pinpoint exactly where the problem came from.
A year later, you expand. You hire two assistant bakers and buy two more ovens. You are now baking 100 bread.
If some of the bread is burned, you now have to spend 2 hours doing admin work (meetings) to pinpoint where the problem came from.
It could be the bakers, the ovens, the ingredients, etc.
Then you expand to 10 branches across the city. If a problem emerges, it is now too complex to pinpoint exactly where the issue arose from.
You have to review 500 emails and have meetings with 10 branch managers to understand your problems. The workers may also be uncooperative and they end up blaming one another.
At this point, your business has been complicated by your exponential growth and without digesting the complexity to resolve the problem, you are at risk of collapse.
This is the lotus pond riddle in effect.
In body building, trainers build their muscle capacity through progressive overload.
If you did 10 reps and 20kg lift yesterday, you increase them to 15 reps and 25kg today, handling more complexity.
For the modern knowledge worker, what is the equivalent of progressive overload?
If you were to train your mind to handle complexity, what specific areas should you focus on?
This is our conversation this week.
At the end of the week, we develop a training playbook showing what we need to be constantly training on to build our own mental muscles.
This way, when complexity emerges like the choked lotus pond, we can rise above it and still achieve our goals rather than collapsing under the weight.
Let’s get started.