Leadership Failure in Complex Initiatives

Extending a recent theme — leading and learning in complex initiatives — I’ve just started looking at a book on The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations.  Many of the conclusions and insight reflect some earlier posts (collected here).  This post may contain my personal record for categories/tags, I guess the complexity topic has become pervasive as well!

The essence of the argument is that most humans think about problems in ways that defeat their efforts to deal with complex problems.  I especially like the insight that complex situations rarely yield to fixed rules consistently.  Per an insight I’ve heard before: “All complex problems require iterative solutions.”  In other words, we need to be prepared to take multiple passes at solving these types of issues, sometimes with different techniques.

Hat tip: George Colony’s Counterintutitive blog (here).