The first article ‘The Need for Complex Intelligence’ explored the three intelligences that produce Complex Intelligence. In this second article I go into more detail. Future articles will explore the most useful models and practices that leaders can use to prepare themselves for life in a VUCA World. |
Introduction
Complex intelligence has the potential to help organisations thrive in a world that will demand continuous technological change, human wisdom and collaborative working. In tomorrow’s interconnected and uncertain work environment, leadership will require new skills to ‘navigate complex systems’. These systems can emerge without warning and require self-organisation and adaptive qualities.
Complex intelligence will be needed to blend a cocktail of new practices to continuously evolve an organisation’s culture, technology and working environment. A holistic perspective will enable leaders to create working environments that integrate human wisdom, technology, and collective thinking.
Enlightened organisations are already adopting the principles of complex intelligence to engage with communities and markets that are becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. (VUCA)
Complex intelligence can be seen in the innate creativity, resilience and adaptability shown by Ukrainian people today. Notice how the whole of society adapted quickly to a sudden change of context. They reinvented machinery and technology for new purposes. Soldiers used their creativity to apply AI technology to modify weapons and strategies to keep up with a continuously evolving situation. They found innovative ways to out manoeuvre their opposition and establish material and intelligence support from their partners. In this way, Ukraine managed to combine local and global intelligence to sustain their determination and commitment to survive. |
Many dynamic events and moving parts connect locally with global interactions in an adaptive system. For example, internationally agreed targets for climate change stimulate local interactions that serve an international purpose. An organisation’s mission seeks to align its employee behaviour to its purpose. These local actions influence global actions that influence local decision-making, thereby creating a sustainable feedback cycle. The “agents” in these complex systems can be people, ideas, data, values, teams, etc., that limit or facilitate joint action.
Courtesy of Life Leadership UK
What does this mean for tomorrow’s leaders?
Enhancing individual intelligence and wisdom requires ongoing investment in learning to align skills with a strategic purpose. More competent, empowered and motivated people will deliver better individual and collective results. Their commitment relies on authentic trust, good feelings, getting agreements, having integrity and effective conversations. It’s about making wise decisions in a shifting context, something humans are much better at than machines.
The growing availability of artificial intelligence will inevitably transform working relationships and create stronger links between innovative action and breakthrough results. Artificial intelligence and communication technology can enhance human and machine interactions to maximise the impact of collective intelligence. These changes alone will stimulate innovative ideas, data exchange and new methods to tackle complex problems.
Embedding these intelligences into leadership practice
Complex intelligences offer new skills and a more systemic way of thinking that tomorrow’s leaders will need to guide their teams in shifting the focus of activity to an evolving context. Leaders will look for patterns, questioning connections and relationships to find opportunities to make iterative improvements.
This environment will require leaders to deal with personal insecurities, scepticism, fear of automation, and rapid policy changes. Building resilience to these overcoming anxieties will require leaders to have coaching skills to turn resentment into ambition. Deeper levels of awareness, emotional maturity, conversation skills, empathy and systems thinking will be needed.
Today’s challenge is deciding when, where, and how to embed data management tools and practices efficiently. It won’t be easy to transform a culture that controls choices into one that thrives on empowerment. It will require employees to respect differences, question assumptions, value cooperation, coordinate their commitments, and collaborate across functional and cultural boundaries.
Coaching skills to transform minds
Embedding new tools and practices is difficult enough. Changing minds and ways of thinking presents a considerable challenge for leaders, requiring courage, empathy, and coaching skills. Leaders must challenge assumptions without judgement to create a non-threatening environment that focuses on mutual care to commit to a better future that satisfies personal ambition and shares feelings.
When the working environment is coping with continuous change, leaders must make quick decisions and act intuitively, expecting everyone to adopt an appreciative attitude towards each other. Leaders can encourage positive feedback, balancing empathy with responsibility when addressing issues of concern.
The leader’s role is to generate and embed a shared understanding of what’s essential for collective accountability. Emotional maturity and integrity will be needed to establish mutual trust. Engaging colleagues and stakeholders in facing facts, exploring possibilities, and embracing uncertainty with courage, curiosity, imagination, and resilience.
Tomorrow’s leaders will require a capacity for “tough love”. Compassion and accountability are essential when dealing with diverse needs, perspectives, and passionate concerns. Leaders must be adept at promoting open and honest conversations that encourage and expect them to take care, especially in how people speak, listen and show respect for each other’s opinions, cultures and personalities.
People-driven leadership
Using individual intelligence
We all can improve our language, mood and body state. A deeper understanding of what makes us human can empower leaders. Artificial Intelligence is already starting to replicate these human capabilities with digital avatars, chatbots and virtual coaching robots. However, leaders must take an ethical perspective in a data-driven, transactional world, valuing goodness, fairness and well-being.
A new way of being and doing
Complexity sciences are taking us into an era of understanding our universe, ourselves, and our relationship with the environment. Our choices influence how we interpret and feel about the world. It becomes the reality we live in, shaped by our history, culture and what we choose to pay attention to.
The ability to influence is needed by tomorrow’s leaders. It’s about growing a “Way of Being” that is thoughtful, present and alert to what is happening and what it could mean for how leaders and their colleagues behave.
Diagram courtesy of The Ontological Coaching Institute
Influencing the mind
It’s down to leaders to assume responsibility for developing their team’s cognitive, emotional, social and practical thinking skills. They can make full use of artificial models and collective learning methods. We tend to think and act more intelligently when engaging each other in meaningful conversations that interrogate verifiable data. Our innate intelligence naturally seeks consensus, thinks creatively, resolves differences, and imagines alternatives. There is danger in not challenging each other’s ignorance, allowing a biased worldview to go unchallenged or avoid moral considerations.
Encourage critical thinking and innovation
As humans, we tend to reject changes that don’t make sense to us or don’t offer personal or mutual gain. Leaders must prepare to move the conversation to challenge the thinking that leaves people stuck in the same story. Inertia can stop us from realising the potential benefits of using AI tools to deliver a more inclusive, productive and fulfilling work experience.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”. Peter Drucker
Critical thinking and fostering innovative ideas enable everyone to share their talents and test alternative practices. For example, introducing self-managed working and team accountability into frontline services. Recognising individuality entities in a workplace with collective values means focusing on skills rather than roles. Leadership, after all, is not a position; it’s a way of being, doing and thinking.
Engagement-driven leadership
Using collective intelligence
Attitudes to employment are changing. Employees want greater autonomy and flexibility in how they work, which is pushing the agenda for hybrid working. At the same time, people want to be better connected for social and mental health reasons. Hence, there is ambiguity and struggle for leaders to connect the whole organisation to one mission.
All employees must feel valued for their views and what they care about. Middle managers have a crucial role to play and will need support to develop their leadership skills to influence new ways of thinking and behaving.
New thinking
Leaders must step forward to create spaces where employees feel safe, their views are listened to, and their opinions can be confidently expressed. Respect for diversity and inclusion requires leaders to value differences as a source of innovation. For example, when expressing cultural sensitivities or dealing with critical feedback when engaging customers, colleagues or stakeholders.
To perform as “agents” in a dynamic and evolving system, leaders must be agile and collaborate to stay aligned to a shared purpose. This behaviour can be observed in living systems such as swarms, flocks, shoals and herds.
For example, flocking birds may look chaotic, but they display collective intelligence by following simple rules. To stay together they must keep up, follow closely without bumping into each other and move to the centre of mass for safety. Successful team members follow these simple rules. Innate leadership and followship are instinctive, allowing for self-organisation and the emergence of quick reactions to adapt to local conditions.
A new commonsense
Teams can influence the conditions that determine the shape, speed, path and direction of their interactions and commitments to each other. The result is self-organising behaviours. They can turn judgemental assumptions into curious questioning and personal concerns into mutual understandings.
AI data is being collected and applied to resolving dilemmas in ways that introduce objectivity into subjective assessments and better decision-making. The human mind reasons, balancing objective and subjective truths to deliver a more considered outcome. Patterns reveal what makes different tools serve different tasks in other control territories. No one best solution works in all contexts.
New insights
Extending video conferencing and large-group interventions can promote collective learning to cross-functional and ideological boundaries. These tools are proving invaluable to leaders seeking new perspectives from sudden realisations. Compromise can uncover new opportunities for growth and insights for improving personal connections and organisational performance.
In the same way, that technology uses algorithms, human beings use their innate wisdom as interdependent, autonomous “agents” working cooperatively to take relationships in a new direction. These dynamic interactions produce realisations and spontaneous ideas that offer possible solutions to wicked problems.
New types of conversation
Collective intelligence uses conversation to raise and share concerns that reveal shared cares and energy for joint action. Different purposes require different types of conversation for other purposes, such as exploring possibilities, getting clarity, coordinating actions or improving relationships. For example, new opportunities emerge when artificial intelligence tools stimulate new thinking and question existing behaviour patterns.
Despite the current wealth of data, conversation is still the best way to tackle sticky issues and disagreements, especially when there is ambiguity and uncertainty in opposing positions. Conflict emerges when different conclusions and moral positions clash, even when the same data produces conflicting conclusions. AI models can suggest alternative interpretations and verifiable evidence to get more productive results.
New relationships
Engaging all key stakeholders in an open conversation in one safe space (physical or virtual) enables diverse views to be shared and connected. Dilemmas resolve as people explain and explore the differences and similarities that shape their conclusions. This approach is essential for team members to feel listened to, respected, included and supported. Participants can test each other’s views and influence each other without fear or favour.
Finding solutions through formal meetings can be less productive when assumptions and biases go unquestioned. Finding innovative solutions requires time for reflection. Problems that appear unfathomable can take much longer to make sense of. When objective facts and subjective truths compete for dominance, human engagement, supported by AI tools, can help reveal common ground and workable solutions.
Technology-driven leadership
Using artificial intelligence
In today’s data-driven world, the ability to analyse and interpret data is no longer optional – speed is essential for making better-informed decisions, launching projects and developing possible strategies. At the operational level, AI tools such as Grammarly, ChatGPT, Chatbots, and Virtual Assistants bring creativity and productivity to everyday tasks. At the strategic level, CRM systems and advanced analytical tools can bring enormous value in identifying hidden problems, exploring possibilities, and finding opportunities to automate workflow and optimise logistics.
Using AI Tools
Most investment in AI tools is applied to linear systems such as wholesale, financial, technological or construction processes. AI offers new insights and potential solutions that would otherwise be impossible to do quickly. This capability transforms decision-making processes and knowledge work, enabling organisations to survive under pressure.
Using technology to free up processing jobs and add value to products and services can help improve productivity and recruitment. The public sector faces more complex systems where investment is limited. However, AI tools do not always enhance job satisfaction, job security or reduce worker stress. They can be disruptive if not introduced sensitively.
Advantages and Disadvantages
It can also be dangerous to rely on algorithms. AI tools are not superior to human intelligence. Well, not yet. They can enhance human action when processing and analysing data. For example, when AI tools can help rewrite emails, find contract errors, or produce different scenarios for planning projects.
There is always the danger of infringing copyright, accepting quick fixes or making only a partial assessment. Human Intelligence is needed to regulate and judge the value of what artificial intelligence produces, mainly when applied to different cultures, contexts and purposes.
Systems-driven leadership
Using complex intelligence
Even complicated processes are becoming more complex as delivery chains cross national and language boundaries. Understanding and managing a networked organisation with thousands of interactions with unknown consequences will require systems thinking. Leading in an environment where delivery is unpredictable, there will be volatility in costs and labour. Without simple answers, the quality of service and trust will inevitably suffer.
This context requires leaders who are resilient under pressure, look for innovative solutions and can quickly reframe their thinking. It is the very essence of complex intelligence. The challenge is dealing with short-term issues while maintaining a clear sense of direction.
Adaptive Action
Working in a complex system requires continuous learning and a desire to learn together. Leaders must encourage the team to discuss what worked and share failures and concerns after every significant event. By acknowledging and talking about their direct experiences, the team can see, understand, and influence the patterns of activity needed to improve their impact and effectiveness to enhance performance in future events.
The following questions in the diagram below can apply to day-to-day team meetings, after-action reviews, project assessments or large-scale consultations. They are helpful when there are no simple answers. Different perspectives are considered before a decision is made. The focus is on various interpretations of what is happening and asking what it means before discussing what needs to happen.
Model courtesy of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute, now HSD Global Services
It is easy to fall into explanations of how something was done or defend the way it was done. The more fruitful exploration is to get a shared view of what happened and how it could have produced a better result. It can be helpful to follow rules for interaction that can:
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It’s important that leaders remain emotionally balanced, accept criticism, facilitate difficult conversations, and advocate for continuous learning and personal development. Leaders must be able to empathise and secure the trust and confidence of managers and stakeholders at all levels and not get lost in the noise from competing messages. The leader’s ability to see the interconnections between different types of intelligence can provide insights to grapple with wicked issues and messy dilemmas.
An understanding of systems thinking will develop a leader’s complex intelligence. Living systems are alert to subtle changes that can produce unintended consequences. This lack of awareness can have unanticipated effects and lead to inappropriate responses. Linear thinking cannot cope with these dynamic interactions.
For example, when faced with difficult decisions or dilemmas, we make choices based on what makes sense when we observe, interpret, and reflect on the consequences. When options are unclear or unpredictable, we look for a deeper understanding (insight), and we then bring together our learning from past experiences (hindsight) with expectations and plans (foresight).
For example, a regenerative agricultural system needs all three intelligences operating to make the whole system work. The farmer’s (human) intelligence makes sense of all the variables by engaging the (collective) intelligence of many experts to analyse the farm’s data (artificial) intelligence before a decision is made. Despite having the best growing conditions, attracting wildlife to increase biodiversity, the farm’s previous output it’s difficult to predict the result. Like all complex systems, farms seek to evolve by continuously adapting and forecasting the future on what they have learned from experience and intuition. |
Enhancing complex intelligence
There are many examples of complex intelligence in action. The challenge is improving performance by enhancing interactions for a more significant effect. For example, artificial intelligence tools will touch every aspect of life and leadership in the future.
Leaders must demand the integration of interpersonal skills with caring attitudes to support team engagement and collaborative learning. Encouraging self-discipline, emotional health and physical well-being, responding positively to individual talent, hybrid working and cultural preferences. These assessments must consider the needs of the whole system and the relationships between the parts.
Teachers use complex intelligence to bring students together into learning spaces, to analyse the data, reason with the facts to embed a new behaviour. Coaches use complex intelligence to create safe spaces to reflect on past experiences to reveal insights from which a more desired way of being can emerge. Surgeons too use complex intelligence to create a learning team to interrogate and analyse patterns of data to diagnose and improve their practices to achieve better outcomes. |