Emma Stewart writes today in a Harvard Business Publishing blog about the futility of Scenario Planning exercises, saying that

.. if you want to avoid fixes that fail and move towards sustainability in today’s complex operating environment, I invite you to resist the instinct to resort to scenario exercises, or only do so in conjunction with systems thinking approaches.

I can see her point, but the elaborate systems thinking approach she is referring to does exist already – generally embedded deep into the fabric of any successful organization. The organizational processes and systems are designed and maintained to weather the ‘normal’ levels of complexity. Scenario Planning, on the other hand, tries to peer into the future in order to develop some decision making criteria as and when needed.

Complexity in business and its operating environment is a given constraint in management. Management challenges exist along two completely opposite paradigms.

At one end we need to delve deep into existing complexity – define it and automate the processes and decisions there – so that we are ’shielded’ from the known complexity or the static view. The system or the model works just fine within the frame of its original assumptions. Taken to an extreme, all possible complexity can be modeled given enough time and data.

On the other end is the unknown complexity introduced as soon as we recognize that we live in a real world of dynamic, moving components that can interact with each other in unpredictable ways to create new scenarios. This is where we need to abstract the complexity into simple models like the famous (or infamous) 2×2 matrices. We need to make empirical decisions quickly because the environment is changing at the same time. Decision models need to be simple and adequate – a criteria difficult to achieve, but still better than trying to stop the world while we analyze our way into paralysis.

Good management needs to manage complexity by instituting structure – enough to be affordable – and by developing abstracted, simple decision models – enough to be useful.

Brent Hutchison John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas recently wrote on a Harvard Business Review blog about the Gamer Disposition - an attitude and set of traits that are ideal for today’s employees. He writes that

Today’s multiplayer online games are large, complex, constantly evolving social systems. Their perpetual newness is what makes them enticing to players.

The gamers have bottom-line orientation, understand the power of diversity, thrive on change, see learning as fun and pride themselves on discovering radical and innovative solutions. All these together are the perfect buzzwords for a resume or a cover-letter that I want to receive for everyone on my team. In this age of accelerating change, we cannot afford static structures and certainly no team that cannot be nimble and quick at the draw.

After establishing that Gamers have the best traits for being the best employee today, it will be interesting to ponder why that might be so. Interactive games provide a compressed timeline, a clear goal but unstructured and unknown environment – requiring rapid learning, environment scan, evaluation of options and decision making…in order to get rewarded by immediate feedback and hopefully a promotion to the next level!

Looks like getting Gamers to be employees is a great idea, but be prepared to create a challenging and exciting environment for them…or watch them switch to another game.

‘Being adaptable’ is one of those backhanded compliments. It can have negative connotations associated with being wishy-washy, spineless, impressionable, naive, crafty, calculating, opportunistic and similar. Despite this the history of civilizations is full of examples where adaptation was critical for survival and for growth.

Adapting and evolving to exploit changes in the environment has now become a business buzzword - being Agile. Definitions of agility can range across the continuum from operational agility to business-model agility. I agree with the latter definition that James Taylor clarified recently.

Agility to us, I think, is a measure of responsiveness to change rather than responsiveness to customers or to orders. It is not the time it takes a company to, for instance, restock a product. While that’s an interesting thing to measure, it is not agility to me. The time it takes a company to change its reorder approach or a specific product/vendor is, however, a measure of agility. 

Being an agile organization requires it to be able to rearrange its people, processes and systems into new configurations at short notice. ‘Composing’ new value chains and business models using existing processes as components is the new competency that sets organizations apart. The new generation systems need to support these process-components in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). And, we need many more of those ‘multiple-hat’ people who morph among roles like architects, business-analysts, project-managers, designers and customer-advocates.

Those video-game playing, text-messaging, social-networking, hyperactive, mobile, multi-tasking kids – and adults – are perfect for this paradigm. Systems are now available as Services that you plug into as and when needed. Businessweek claimed recently that  you may never buy software (or hardware) again.

No longer do small companies have to spring for servers and IT staff just to get the basics. With software services, you don’t install programs on your own computers or server. Instead, you sign up online for software and use it while you’re connected to the Internet.  

This agile, anything-can-change-at-any-time world needs ‘being adaptable’ in spades. The pace of change is accelerating and business-ecologies are constantly forming, dissolving, splitting, aggregating and reforming in a kaladeoscopic blur.

The Adaptables are center-stage now – as always leading the charge for survival and growth.