Introducting video on complexity

Hello everyone, nice that you are watching, welcome to this part of the course!

You are most likely an engineer that has the responsibility for either a group, lead a
department or get assigned large projects. In other words, you are in a leading position and
show your leadership skills. That is a very nice position in which you can achieve really a lot
with the people around you in the situations that you encounter.

And I can imagine you are on the constant look out to learn more so you are capable of
doing more and achieving better results.

Leadership then is an interesting phenomena. It has all kinds of facets, not one of them
being necessarily better than another, however, mastering all of them will make you able to
adapt to any situation. In addition to this, the situations we face are almost all complex in
nature. What I mean is that there is no way of knowing all and be the ultimate expert who
makes the perfect choices.

So we have two ambiguous things. Leadership itself. And the situations we face. For both,
there is no one in the world who can claim to know it all. No one can tell you this style of
leadership focusing on these factors is this best way of dealing with this particular situation.

What I mean is, how many situations that you encounter in your work for instance look like
a jigsaw puzzle. Smaller jigsaw puzzles are easier and can be solved faster, larger ones take a
bit more time, but all of them have one right final situation. There is no discussion if you
solved your jigsaw puzzle correctly. But there is discussion in the situations you encounter in
your work!

How about company culture changes, how about improving your production facilities, how
about better working circumstances and reducing sick leave and job hopping, how about
launching a new product in a market, or about discovering the possibilities for products in a
new market? These are not jigsaw puzzles. And although there are many ideas on how to act
in these situations, no one can claim that one of these ideas is the best.

When it comes to leadership it helps if you master many different mindsets.

And this part of the course is one of them. This is the analytical mindset. It is not the best
nor the most important one, just as any other mindset, it is a very useful mindset if you
master it well. The analytical approach to complex situations makes you create an overview.
Applying this approach structures the situation. It facilitates you eventually in making
decisions.

Now let me discuss two very different situations with you so you get an idea of the kind of
situations an analytical approach can help you with.
You are assigned the task to discover the market opportunities for a new soft drink in
Western Europe. Your company has some core values about products, one is Health,
another one is Fun, for instance. The classic drinks are seen as too unhealthy with all kind of
sugars and not adding anything nutritious to the body, while the drinks that do, don’t look
like fun but look a bit boring. The difficulty here is that many new drinks use this health and
fun values, while actually being nothing else than water, sugar and a few percentages of
flavor. Now where do you start? Well, what is the issue here might be a good first question.
You might analyze the situation in Western Europe for everything that has to do with
drinking and health. And you analyze the situation your company is in, what it stands for,
what it produces, what it is capable of. Comparing these two analysis, one of the external
world of Western Europe and one of the internal world of your company, and you have
defined a strategic complex situation in which you can act. You have to create matches
between the situation in Western Europe and the situation in your company. And these
matches are your market opportunities. And you need a lot of ideas of many people to
identify them and make them happen.

If you work for an airport and have growth figures of well over 5% per year, sooner or later
your capacity is too small. You need either to expand, or you see your market literally fly
away to other airports or modalities such as high speed trains. Missed business
opportunities! But expanding is not so easy, there are a lot of people who don’t like it and
most airports face strict boundary conditions on noise levels and air quality. A first analytical
step is find out what all these people and organizations (including yourself and your own
organization), what they face as challenge. A simple way to do this is to formulate dilemmas.
What does the airport face as a dilemma: well larger capacity, but not at the cost of a lot
more noise. And the municipality nearby? Probably less noise, but not at the cost of the loss
of labor opportunities in the area. Another group might put forward that safety is an issue,
so they don’t mind the airport to increase it’s capacity, as long as safety levels do not drop
too much. Yet another group is worried about ever increasing emissions of CO2 and climate
change and likes the airport expand with less climate influencing activities.

The idea here is to analyze the situation first before thinking about particular ideas for
changing it. Otherwise people are already fighting over who is right before knowing what
the situation is all about.

In this part of the course I will help you apply several analytical steps to your own complex
situation. And I help you to critically look at it, so in the end you know what the added value
is of such a mindset. And then the overall course moves on to yet another mindset. To ever
expand your capabilities of showing good leadership.

I suggest some new ideas in this video and I have put together a sort of quiz. Not to test you,
but to help you to critically think about a few statements related to the ideas in the video. It
is just another way of reading a book. Only now I give you some statements to think about
while after that I elaborate on the issue in a short text. Then, I guide you step by step
through an application of the ideas in the video on a case of your own. And, of course, help
you to critically review your own work based on what I have seen from all those thousands
of people who tried to apply it before you.

Well it’s time to get started. Enjoy the course. And I see you in the next video.