Cracking Complexity by David Komlos

Author:David Komlos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus

Figure 9.1 Step 6

Start by Deciding What to Talk About

Now that you’ve got all the right people focused on answering the really good question you’ve articulated, don’t tell them what to talk about. If you were worried about introducing bias when you developed your question or decided what information to send out ahead of time, setting the agenda for the group will bias the outcome for sure.

Let the group decide what they have to talk about in order to answer the question. They need an agenda, and they need to be the people who set it. Their first task together is agreeing on how to deconstruct the question into the right component parts to discuss. This is the start of the “disentangling” of complexity we referred to earlier. What are the facets? What are the dots? How do we get at this? This is also when they begin to take ownership of the outcomes.

In our application of the Complexity Formula, we devote the first half day to agenda setting. That’s how important it is.

Take a glance back at the 12 zones of variety again. That’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of disparate people who cover it. There’s also a lot of data, information, and knowledge to deal with. And a bunch of language barriers to overcome. We have found that there is no better way to get started on the path to shared understanding than to first come to a shared understanding of the topics to cover.

It is also an opportunity to engage participants in something different and to get them owning everything that they will discuss and take with them after the Formula is completed. A certain mystique emerges when groups create their own agenda: It opens their eyes and minds to the possibility that their time together isn’t going to be what they’re used to. After they’ve completed the Formula, people reflect on the agenda-setting exercise as one of several pivotal moments in cracking the complexity.

If the challenge at hand is revenue growth, the span of potential topics could include:

• What is the envisioned future for the organization when it comes to markets and products? Where should we be seeking growth?

• What will be the impact of the planned growth on people in the organization? Are they equipped to deal with it? Are they incented properly?

• How will we fend off the current and emerging competitive threats so that we’re not losing ground at the same time that we’re trying to grow?

• Are our business processes scalable? Our technology infrastructure? Or does the planned growth overtax what we’ve got in place, and if so what do we do about that?

• What do our customers want and need from us? How will their demand fuel our growth?

• How will our culture be impacted as we grow? Do we have a culture that is able to adopt a growth mind-set?

• Are we innovative enough to develop the new products and services that will drive growth? Do

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