Introduction
This is the fourth article in a series on Complex Intelligence. They explain the concept and its relevance for leadership in a VUCA context. They looks at the implications for Local Authorites and the need for self-regulating team networks to address VUCA’s challenges. Future articles will explore the competencies, cultural changes and future of Local Authorites in a digital age.
“The world will be more networked, but hierarchies will not go away – they just won’t dominate the way they have in the past.” Lipnack and Stamps
It’s asking a lot to expect public sector organisations that rely on tight control and predictability, to adapt to a VUCA environment (6) overnight. Complex systems are self-organisiaing, continuously changing and operate across boundaries. They will require new approches to leadership, collaboration and cooperation.
Employees are experiencing disruption, resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, rising costs, and feelings of insecurity. Basic social needs, such as a sense of belonging or recognition are missing in many workplaces. They lack of authenticity, transparency and inclusiveness is leading to disengagement from the challenges of VUCA.
The challenge is how to design an organisation that can combine the disciplines of hierarchy with the social networks that bring motivation and a unifying purpose into the workplace.Networking is needed to weave together a variety of interdependent relationships between service providers, users, and stakeholders to engage with a shared vision of what they care about.
In theis emerging VUCA world, local and global issues are becoming intrinsically linked, by many complex interconnections. Addressing the ambiguities this brings will require the development of human intelligences, that enhance individual,and collective intelligences with artificial intelligence . The challenge is how to influence the “big system” issues that are impacting on the everyday needs of communities and vice versa.
The VUCA (6) challenge is how to redesign organisation structures and relationships so that hierarchy and networks can combine to adapt, evolve and self-organise in response to fast, unpredicatable changes. Networks, both physical and virtual can connect a variety of interdependent service providers, users, and stakeholders. This will require a different approach to leadership and the cutting of overheads and red tape. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety demonstrates that a human system needs to be at least as complex as its environment, or it will die.
Why is systems thinking important?
Network technology and systems thinking combine to regenerate human connections. They are needed to build a coherent, ethical and adaptive form of relationship that builds trust and social connection. Local authorities that develop “complex intelligence” (4) are better able to anticipate trends using human creativity, imagination and their innate wisdom.
The focus on intelligence is important. People want to create a future where their lives and their collective interests (2) matter in achieving a positive impact. Self-regulating teams can extend people’s individual intelligence (1) to work across functional and professional boundaries at multiple levels. The result is more innovative, responsive and better integrated services for users and providers. The arrival of artificial intelligence (3) and quantum computing now offer insights into both/and solutions where opposites need to be accommodated with innovative solutions.
A methods such as Interdependent Pairs can help individuals and groups to explore the paradoxes that emerge from the complexity in their systems. A more detailed explanation can be found HERE.
Opinions may need to be compared between a number of associated polarities that my include network v hierarchy, centralisation v decentralisation, long-term v short-term decisions, collaborative v independent work, to optimise preferences as they impact on the whole system. Barry Johnson, in his Handbook of Polarity Management, describes these pairs as polarities, issues faced by self-regulating teams that do not have simple either/or answers..
Why Self-Regulating Teams?
Bureaucratic silos still dominate local authorities and are stifling innovation, slowing down decision-making, especially at this time when the public want their services to be agile, more responsive and less wasteful of time and resources. The pressure is on to reduce service failures by more efficient working across boundaries, overcoming polarised thinking and making work more meaningful and satisfying.
A concern among citizens is that bureaucracy is not delivering the speed of change that’s so urgently needed. The introduction of self-regulating, self-directed or self-managed teams (5) could reenergise the pace of change by fostering a higher level of engagement, and mutual respect for employee intelligence and autonomy.
A self-managed work team is defined as a small group of employees who take full responsibility for delivering a service or product through peer collaboration without a manager’s guidance. This limits the need for bureaucratic procedures. For example, allowing those closest to the action to use their individual intelligence (1) to produce ideas and initiatives that enable them to adapt quickly to change and eliminate those behaviours that don’t add value for service users or stakeholders.
Why is engagement important?
Bureaucracy can be blind to negative attitudes and moods, for example when employees feel disrespected, undervalued and unwanted in the workplace. It feeds resentment and feelings of frustration that generate a lack of commitment and ambition. What’s the point of conversations if those in authority seem unable to listen, care or act with conviction.
To create the conditions for more engagement and productive action, teams must be empowered to establish rules that work better for them and their service users. Empowering teams to operate closer to their stakeholders who engage service users and local community organisations, is now vital to improve both “customer” and “provider” relationships. Building authentic trust comes from team-to-team negotiation on what improved performance means and how to cooperate better to make it happen. The diagram below explains a process that teams can use to clarify their concerns before making requests and offers to each other to deliver a shared goal. More on managing promises can be found HERE.
Courtesy of Alan Seiler – Ontological Coaching Institute
By embodying the principles and behaviours outlined in the diagram above, teams can develop their collective intelligence (2) to learn skills needed to embrace VUCA challenges. Embedding complex intelligence (4) in teams helps them understand the nature of complexity and learn how to navigate the resulting uncertainties and ambiguities that emerge in a polarising political and social environment. Previous articles in the complex intelligence series explain how this can happen.
Self-regulated teams deliver strong accountability where each member takes responsibility for their commitments, supporting each other to achieve the team’s goals. This accountability is supported by regular feedback and peer assessments. This helps individuals stay aligned with team goals and committed to improving their individual skills. This enhances employment opportunities.
What impact can team networks have on performance?
Performance management is about gathering and using data to inform priorities for action, ones that will deliver measurable outcomes. Problems stem from low levels of satisfaction and actions that fail to achieve service improvements. This issue requires team coaching to improve self-motivation, team support, and open communication to give each other honest feedback This is how systems regulate themselves and interact to have a positive or negative impact on change.
Questionable directives from the “top” lower levels of engagement and diminish overall performance. Teams want to be trusted to coordinate and agree behaviours between them that are important in enabling their performance to improve. For example, sharing what they learn from service users that can make an observable difference.
The biggest challenge is how to improve the employee’s innate intelligence so they can engage and resolve conflicting thoughts. For example, the matching of employee potential to bridge skill gaps, and on-the-job training in the use of AI tools. Team coaching greatly enhances emotional maturity and fosters caring relationships through paired learning.
Emotions are our mood managers that enable us to connect with what it means to be human. They are our internal navigation system – our personal SatNav, that takes us into a more heartfelt relationship with life, other people and our environment. It requires us to reframe our thinking to accept that our moods and attitudes prevent us from creating a more hopeful future.
Based on the work of Prof Alan Seiler
Without a willingness to think differently, VUCA (6) pressures will only generate more anxiety and frustration. This inevitably produces more top-down pressure for more control that eventually produces feelings of overwhelm and loss of control. A resistance to accept difficult facts, explore possibilities or embrace uncertainty makes it impossible to build the momentum needed to engage teams to use complex intelligence (4) techniques to self-organise and adapt swiftly to a rapidly changing context.
What is needed to support team networking?
My experience of working with team networks is that they are not a replacement for a hierarchical structure, but a valuable addition for working across boundaries. They can be formal and informal. Lipnack and Stamps offer 5 simple steps to the process.
Clarify the purpose that connects the teams
Identify the participants and roles
Establish the nature of the connections
Agree who is responsible for what
Integrate the connections to the hierarchy and stakeholders
In my consultancy work with Birmingham City Council, I led several initiatives to develop networking between teams from within and between its departments. For example, I facilitated “Learning Labs” where a teams, drawn from different department would address problems around cost, servive improvement, management controls or a service user concern. They world engage in opening new channels of coopertation to build trust.
The levels of energy and commitment were high, but bureaucratic rules frustrated innovation by placing unnecessary procedures and administrative processes which the Labs found difficult getting senior management agreement.
An initiative with the Schools Library Service was successful in enabling the team to self-manage and independently establish a new book delivery service. This was done by engaging a network of schools across the city. It reduced costs. paperwork, and the need for teachers to amnually handle heavy book boxes in their own vehicles.
I also directed and facilitated a corporate initiative to establish thirteen project teams from different departments to “Learn from Service Users”. They pulled together members of different internal teams and stakeholders to listen and implement user suggestions by aligning different service functions to improve their service. Valuable lessons were learned but few were embedded. Inadequate leadership support, insufficient resourcing or difficulty sustaining new arrangements were stifled by internal politics, budget constraints and bureaucratic procedures.
Another initiative involved an annual “Team Talk” event. It enabled teams from all departments to come together to share their learning and experience of embedding changes to improve service performance and user satisfaction for a customer group. A large percentage were successfully embedded when supported by a Chief Officer. Others could not get support to establish new processes or find the costs of team training. See ToolBoxes for Leadership and Coaching
Why coach the whole team and its team network?
For dynamic change to happen, the whole team needs coaching in foundational leadership and relationship skills. To work, the teams must actively want to commit to learn new opportunities for personal growth and collaborative working. A commitment to continuous learning must be seen as a strategic priority, ensuring that teams remain competitive and have the courage to challenge the status quo and innovate to solve complex problems.
This means supporting teams to work effectively across boundaries with other teams. Opportunities to train together in learning networks facilitates a sense equality and inclusion to serve a shared vision of what matters. This is vital to integrate diverse perspectives and access the collective intelligence of service users, communities, stakeholders – include Trade Unions and elected members.
More effort needs to go into unlocking political support for networking and productivity improvements by enabling service partners to have a stronger say in how services are delivered. It’s time to recognise the unique strengths and insights that community development and youth work can bring cohesion to the service improvement agenda by engaging communities in decision-making and problem-solving.
How can networks use hierarchy?
Networks need hierarchies to get strategic alignment. Networks are useful ways of promoting innovation and learning across boundaries. Hierarchy is needed to maintain corporate functions, ensuring consistency and proper safeguards for employees. Coordination requires strategic leadership, coordinating priorities from the centre of the network, not imposed through bureaucratic rules and operational instructions.
This means turning hierarchy on its side so that more attention is placed on listening to service users and providers to empower and offer development opportunities. It fosters employee engagement and better relationships with stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation.
For example, in the diagram above one network coordinator (NC) could be responsible for the Special Needs Transport Service, connecting internal stakeholders (IN) that cross functional boundaries such as school secretaries, social workers and clerical staff who may be involved in other service networks, and the external stakeholders (EX) such escorts, parents and bus/taxi providers. They work together to deliver a shared commitment to one group of service users – children with disabilities. An Assistant Director (AD) in an Education Department could oversee and advise on alignment with corporate strategy and policy. The more boundary crossing connections that are made, the more value is gained from sharing each other’s operational intelligence.
Why leadership needs to be distributed
Leadership skills are enhanced when everyone makes commitments with a variety of colleagues and stakeholders. They gain valuable insights from each other’s perspectives, positions, professions, functions, backgrounds, locations, and experiences. Small teams act like cells in the body having roles and identities as do the people in them who create the mission of the organisation through their interactions.
This produces a deeper awareness of the differences and similarities from which improvement issues can be explored and solutions generated. Future Search or Open Space techniques are useful tools for engaging, designing and agreeing the system that offers the best solution by applying “complex intelligence” to the problem. This means linking people in physical face-to-face as well as virtual conversations online. People think more creatively and generate more ideas when in a dialogue that serves a mutual concern, goal or opportunity.
Three system conditions influence the speed, path, and direction of change in self-regulating teams. These conditions and behaviours shape the pattern of interaction that makes up the model of reality faced by the team. Glenda Eoyang discovered these conditions in her research. The three conditions, elegantly simple, are brief described HERE,
An introduction to complex concepts would equip network coordinators with the core skills to master collaborative networking within their teams and networks. The coordinators would linkteams at multiple levels that serving the same service users and stakeholders. The trade unions will inevitably want to maintain collective bargaining rights to ensure that self-regulating initiatives do not undermine individual protections or lead to exploitation. Care is needed to ensure that network participants are rewarded for additional skills and any specialised responsibilities that they may undertake on a temporary basis.
The (AD) will ensure that organisation and individual performance is aligned, maintained and improved to lower transaction costs and productive cooperation. Strategies and processes can pivot in real-time to support sudden changes when facing new challenges. Shifting the culture from bureaucratic to more networked team structures is essential if local authorities are to find new ways of working that promote human creativity, reciprocity, equality and trust.
Glossary of Terms
(1) Individual Intelligence
Intelligence is typically defined as the ability of individuals to engage in abstract reasoning, make decisions, solve problems, understand complex ideas, and be aware of changes in their environment. It involves the application of cognitive (knowing, learning and understanding) and affective (mood, feeling and attitude) skills.
(2) Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is found in the values and actions that harmonise team and organization relationships. It reflects the sum of individual intelligences, coordinated and driven by a shared reality or vision. It uses advanced technology to communicate more effectively and find agreement on competing priorities.
(3) Artificial Intelligence
Access to reliable data enhances the capacity of both individuals and groups to solve difficult problems and make better decisions. AI tools can find hidden patterns in complex data and suggest novel solutions. They learn from our language and behaviour to anticipate our needs and thereby influence the world we see and engage with. Used intelligently, it can prompt us to be more empathetic, emotionally intelligent and more human.
(4) Complex Intelligence
Open and self-regulated conversations and knowledge bases working together to find new insights, diverse perspectives and innovative ideas to tackle complex problems and adapt arrangement where no obvious solution exists. When the rules controlling the patterns of interaction become clear, AI tools can produce more efficient workflows and coordinate the exchange of information and commitments to produce more effective working.
(5) Self-Regulating Teams
Self-regulating teams are self-managed or self-directed. Team members plan and coordinate what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. They feel a sense of accountability and shared purpose to align their objectives with corporate priorities. These teams thrive on open communication, peer support, and shared problem-solving to achieve their objectives. They work with more agility adapting to changes in the workplace demands and context, responding quickly to new challenges and opportunities.
Team members feel empowered to make decisions collaboratively and take ownership of their work with higher levels of satisfaction and motivation. As a result, they achieve higher productivity by streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy.
Everyone in the team is coached in leadership and followship skills to foster a culture of trust and empowerment, allowing team members to take ownership and make decisions to deliver on their commitments without micromanagement.
They learn techniques for addressing conflict and disagreements constructively, resolving disagreements to avoid disrupting team dynamics.
(6) VUCA
Work in VUCA environment must be action focused, making small changes and evaluating their impact to adjust the next step and build resilience, collaboration and innovation to deal with:
Volatility: The speed and unpredictability of change.
Uncertainty: The lack of predictability in actions and outcomes.
Complexity: The multiplicity of factors and their interconnections.
Ambiguity: The lack of clarity and potential for misinterpretation.