"A jumbo jet is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex..."

As I've mentioned a few times in the last several posts, I've been doing a lot of reading about chaos theory and complexity theory lately.  These two topics are highly interrelated and absolutely fascinating.  I've never fully appreciated the subtle differences between complex systems and merely complicated ones.  Let me explain.  Just take a look at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definitions of complex versus complicated below:

Complex - a group of obviously related units of which the degree and nature of the relationship is imperfectly known; hard to separate, analyze, or solve

Complicated - consisting of parts intricately combined; difficult to analyze, understand, or explain

They sound fairly similar, right?  Both terms are often used interchangeably, at least in an everyday kind of context.  However, when it comes to complexity theory, the two terms are quite distinct.  Mary Uhl-Bien and Michael Arena have written extensively on the kind of leadership required in complex systems, and in one of their articles ("Complexity leadership: Enabling people and organizations for adaptability"), they provided what I think is the best characterization of the differences between complex systems and merely complicated ones.  They wrote, "… a jumbo jet is complicated but mayonnaise is complex. When you add parts to a jumbo jet they make a bigger entity but the original components do not change–a wheel is still a wheel, a window is a window, and steel always remains steel. When you mix the ingredients in mayonnaise (eggs, oil, lemon juice), however, the ingredients are fundamentally changed, and you can never get the original elements back. In complexity terms, the system is not decomposable back to its original parts…"

As Alex Di Miceli explains in a blog post on Medium ("Complex or complicated?"), complex systems are emergent, meaning that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.  Like the mayonnaise, you can't break complex systems down into their individual components easily and figure out how they work together.  Complicated systems are not emergent, so you can break these systems down into their individual components rather easily and see how they fit and interact together.  He writes further:

"A car engine is complicated, traffic is complex."

"Building a skyscraper is complicated. The functioning of cities is complex."

"Coding software is complicated. Launching a software startup is complex."

To the same extent, nerve cells are complicated, but the brain is complex.  Ian Stewart, who co-wrote a book called The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World with Jack Cohen, once said, "If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't." 

"How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?"

Today, October 31st, is Halloween, a day that children celebrate by dressing up in costumes and going door-to-door in search of candy, usually asking the question, "Trick or Treat?"  They almost always get a "treat" so there is rarely, if ever, a "trick"!  If I do happen to write a blog post on October 31st, I usually try to make it at least a little fun - for some of my past Halloween posts, see "Don't go anywhere with scary, spooky, or haunted in the title" or "Are Trick-or-Treaters honest?"  I'll keep with the tradition today.  

There's a really good chance that most children who go Trick-or-Treating tonight will find a Tootsie Pop in their bag at the end of the night.  Tootsie Pops were basically lollipops that had a Tootsie Roll at the center.  There was a famous commercial from my childhood, "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?"  A boy goes asking around to see if the smartest animals (Mr. Fox, Mr. Turtle, and finally Mr. Owl) know how many licks it takes to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop.   All I can say is that "If there's anything I can't stand, it's a smart owl" (just watch the commercial). 

Raise your hand if you ever tried to find out as a child!  I never made it - just like Mr. Turtle (and as it turns out, Mr. Owl), I always gave up after so many licks and just bit down into the candy to get to the Tootsie Pop.  Well, apparently several independent groups of scientists have actually tried to find out the answer.  It's a legitimate scientific question!

A group of Purdue University engineering students (Boiler Up!) designed and built a licking machine modeled after the human tongue and determined that it took an average (over a number of trials) of 364 licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  As a comparison, a group of twenty human volunteers also performed the test (without the machine) and found that it took only 252 licks.  Not to be outdone by their Big Ten rivals (at least in academics, though certainly not in football - but if they weren't stealing signs, who knows?), a chemical engineering student at the University of Michigan created his own customized licking machine and found that it took 411 licks to get to the center.  

There was a larger clinical study involving 130 human subjects from Bellarmine University.  They actually published their findings (check out their study results here), and it seems that there can be variation in the number of licks required based on the color of the Tootsie Pop!  Regardless, on average, they found that it took 175 licks in just over 14 minutes to get to the Tootsie Roll center. (oh, and Orange Tootsie Pops are the quickest).  Finally, a group of middle school science students at Swarthmore Junior High School found that it took an average of 144 licks.

Wow - based on the best available scientific data, it can take anywhere from 144 licks to 411 licks to get to the center.  It's clear to me that the world may never know how many licks it really does take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.  Trick or Treat!

Drunkard's Walk

I finished reading a great book a few months ago by the theoretical physicist, Leonard Mlodinow entitled The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  I highly recommend it!  Mlodinow talks about the role of randomness in our everyday lives and the cognitive biases that lead us to misinterpret them.  The laws of probability may seem simple on their surface (and I say that while fully admitting that some of these so-called "simple laws" are beyond my understanding), but in a world that is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and turbulence (VUCAT), it's often difficult and at times impossible to distinguish between random and non-random events.  He writes, "If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events."

Mlodinow is one of the few theoretical physicists that I have encountered (I've been reading a lot of books on chaos and complexity lately - trust me) who can explain specialized topics in ways that even non-physicists can understand.  He writes about concepts such as "regression toward the mean" and "the law of large numbers" and discusses how such things as wine ratings and political polls are surprisingly random.  He spends most of one chapter on the famous "Monty Hall problem" and how it applies to our everyday lives.  He even writes a little on complex systems and chaos - "In complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents" (sounds a lot like the "butterfly effect" right?).  

Mlodinow writes, "The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors."  The truth is, we live in a random, non-linear world.  He ends the book with what I thought was a very powerful point, "What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.  For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success.  Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

Failure

After the 8th seed Miami Heat defeated the number one seed Milwaukee Bucks last year in the first round of the playoffs (4-1 in the best-of-seven series), Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo was asked by sports journalist Eric Nehm whether the season was a failure (see the video clip here).  Antetokounmpo was a little defensive at first, but then he responded with what I think is a Master Class on success versus failure:

Oh my god. You asked me the same question last year, Eric ... okay? Do you get a promotion every year? In your job? No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal — which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. You work towards a goal — it’s not a failure. It’s steps to success. I don’t want to make it personal. There’s always steps to it. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me. I’m asking you a question, yes or no? Exactly. So why you ask me that question? It’s the wrong question.

Antetokounmpo was clearly frustrated.  And who wouldn't be?  His team was just eliminated in the first round of the play-offs by the lowest seeded team.  It was a crushing loss, and Antetokounmpo effectively missed the first three games of the series due to injuries.  The team had won the NBA World Championship two seasons earlier, and everyone had expected them to compete for another championship that year.  Instead, they were sent home by a Miami Heat team that wasn't as talented and wasn't supposed to win.  Antetokounmpo continued:

There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits , try to play better. Not having 10 days straight of playing bad basketball, and hopefully we can win a championship. So 50 years from 1970-2021 that we didn’t win a championship, it was 50 years of failure? No, it was not. It was steps to it. We were able to win one, hopefully we’re able to win another one.

I am reminded of another great basketball player, Michael Jordan and a famous Nike commercial that perfectly encapsulates what it means to fail:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

The take-home message here is that no matter what you do for a living (sports, business, medicine, etc) and no matter how good you are at it, you will experience failure at some point.  The true champions and experts are the individuals who learn from their experience at failure, change their approach, and do better the next time.  As someone once told me, the word "Fail" is an acronym for "First attempt in learning."  The more we fail, the more we learn.  And the more we learn, the better we become.

Necessary companions, but often strangers

Several months ago, I wrote a post about something that I called the Accountability-Authority Matrix, which I based, at least in part, on the well-known RACI model.  I recently came across another article ("Leadership Strangers: Authority and Accountability") with a similar 2x2 matrix based upon authority and accountability, and I thought it was worth sharing.  Jon Mertz introduces the topic with, "A project or initiative begins.  Do we have the authority to lead?  An initiative deviates.  Do we have accountability in results?"  He continues, "Authority and accountability are necessary companions, yet they are often strangers."  

I could not agree more.  Authority has to come with accountability, and the reverse is also true.  If you are going to hold someone accountable for performance, you better make sure that they are provided with the requisite authority to make the necessary decisions to assure successful completion of a project or initiative.

Mertz created a 2x2 matrix with "Accountability" on the vertical axis and "Authority" on the horizontal axis.  

Four situations can develop, depending upon how much clarity there is around a leader's authority and accountability.

1. Vague Authority and Vague Accountability: When a leader's decisionmaking authority is vague and no one is sure who is being held accountable for decisions, the project or initiative is perfectly set-up for failure.  No one is making decisions, and no one is being held accountable for poor performance in this situation.  

2. Vague Authority and Clear Accountability: When a leader is being held accountable for decisions that he or she does not have the authority to make, there is usually an impasse.  Stalemate. Finger-pointing. Passing the blame.  Organizations stagnate in this situation, because nothing gets done and nothing moves forward.

3. Clear Authority and Vague Accountability: Without the necessary level of of accountability, leaders often become self-serving (I labeled leaders who fall into this quadrant, "Dictators" in my matrix).  

4. Clear Authority and Clear Accountability: Mertz writes, "Vibrant authority is our fuel, strong accountability is our mile marker."  Here we have the ideal situation.  Here is where organizations thrive.  "Authority provides power, while accountability keeps power centered."

A drop of honey...

Hovhannes Tumanyan was a prolific writer who created fables, epics, novels, poems, and even translations of classic works by Byron, Goethe, and Pushkin into his native language, Armenian.  Today he is widely considered to be the national poet of Armenia.  He wrote a poem called "A Drop of Honey" in 1909, which I haven't been able to find on the Internet.  However, the poem has been paraphrased by a number of authors, and I will do so again here:

There once lived a king who ruled over a country far away in a time long ago.  On a warm, sunny, summer afternoon, the king sat with one of his ministers in his luxurious palace that overlooked the market place of the city.  The king was eating a dessert of puffed rice with honey, and he looked over his land with great pride and satisfaction.  It was a magnificent palace in an even more magnificent city in an even more magnificent country.  Life was great.

As he was thinking about his great fortune and success, a small drop of honey dripped from his puffed rice onto the window ledge.  The minister was about to call a servant to come and wipe up the drop of honey, but the king waved a hand to stop him, saying, "Don't bother.  It's only a little drop of honey.  It's not our problem."

The minister shrugged his shoulders and looked back down at the drop of honey.  The drop of honey trickled slowly over the window ledge and dropped down on the street below.  Shortly thereafter, a fly came buzzing by and landed on the sweet drop of honey that had fallen onto the street.  A nearby lizard saw the fly and shot out its tongue to catch it.  But this alerted a nearby cat, who suddenly pounced on top of the lizard, trapping it under its paw.  

As it so happened, a dog was lying at one of the market stalls close by, and when the dog saw the cat jump into the middle of the street, he ran to chase his worst enemy, the cat.  The dog and cat started fighting with each other in the middle of the street.  The king and his minister heard the commotion below.

The minister was about to call a servant to go and deal with the two animals, when the king again waved his hand and said, "Relax.  It's only a cat and a dog.  And they belong to someone in the market place, not me.  We should not interfere.  It's not our problem."

The cat's owner was absolutely horrified to see his cat being attacked by the dog.  He started whacking the dog with a broom.  Of course, the dog's owner was horrified to see her dog being attacked by the cat, so she started whacking the cat with her broom.  

Soon, more people started coming out from their stalls and houses to see what all the screaming and shouting was about.  Some of these people were friends with the cat's owner, and others were friends of the dog's owners.  They all started arguing with each other, supporting their friends.  A fight broke out in the middle of the street.  The worried minister turned once more to the king, whose only comment was "Not our problem.  We should not interfere.  Have some puffed rice with honey and do not trouble yourself any further."

As the king and his minister continued to watch, the police arrived to break up the fight.  Unfortunately, the people had become so angry, that they started fighting the police.  It was a full-scale riot.  The king turned to his minister and said, "I know what you are thinking, but it's not our problem.  Besides, the army can handle this."

But the army couldn't stop it.  The riot swiftly escalated with looting and destruction all over the city.  Buildings were set on fire, and by the next morning the once magnificent city had been reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes.  The king and his minister looked down with horror.  The king sighed and said, "Oh, maybe the little drop of honey was our problem."

Sounds a lot like the "butterfly effect", doesn't it?

"So are the ants..."

I finished my last post ("The longer you stay...the longer you stay") with a great quote by Henry David Thoreau: "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"  It seems that many, if not most, of organizations today are operating with the management mindset that "more is better" :  If you want maximum results, you should put forth maximum effort.  But is that really true?  Is there evidence to support that statement?

As it turns out, maybe "maximum effort" doesn't always turn into the "maximum results".  Greg McKeown wrote a nice article for the online Harvard Business Review, "To build a top performing team, ask for 85% effort" and suggests a better formula, "optimal effort = maximum results".  Counterintuitively, less effort can actually lead to greater success!  He talks about something known as the "85% rule".  The "85% rule" is about "consistency, pacing, and finishing" and is well known in the field of sports performance.  Carl Lewis, one of the greatest Track and Field athletes of all-time was known as a "slow starter" and "great finisher" - he would push himself hard, but only to 85%.  Just look at how effortlessly the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt blows away the rest of the competition.  Look out how relaxed he really is - is he putting forth 100% effort?  Not really.  He's putting forth optimal effort.  

The same is true when it comes to performance outside of athletics.  We do better when we engage with our optimal effort, not our maximal effort.  If we push ourselves too hard and for too long, we paradoxically end up performing worse.  And if we continue to push ourselves in that manner, we will burn ourselves out.

McKeown provides a number of suggestions for leaders to build high-performing teams without burning them out (by following the "85% rule"):

1.  Create a "done for the day" time:  I love this recommendation!  When possible, leaders should establish a "done for the day" time that their teams should follow, unless there is an emergency.  McKeown writes, "When managers are ambiguous about the length of workdays, they risk introducing decision fatigue, diminishing returns, or even getting negative returns from their employees."  Remember, "the longer you stay...the longer you stay."  McKeown tells a story of a a new employee at a private equity firm who was eager to make a good impression by staying late.  His manager saw him working past the "done for the day" time and asked, "Why are you still here?  We don't stay late here unless there is an absolute emergency.  We want you to be fresh tomorrow morning. Please go home."

2.  Ask for a little less than maximum capacity: In other words, apply the "85% rule" in your organization.  There is a very well-known concept in exercise and rehabilitation called "perceived exertion".  Essentially, "perceived exertion" is how hard you think your body is working, which as it turns out, is fairly accurate.  For example, if the "perceived exertion" is on a scale of 1 (lowest level of exertion) and 10 (maximum level of exertion), individuals should be targeting a score of between 8 to 9 most of the time.  

3.  Ask "how am I making your work more stressful than it needs to be?": Sometimes, just asking the members of your team what you, as their leader, are doing to cause more stress and anxiety can be very enlightening.  For example, I've always been one to check and respond to emails at the end of the day or on weekends.  What kind of message does that send to my team?  Even if I tell them that I don't expect for them to follow my lead, they usually do, because they think that I expect them to respond to me.  McKeown mentions a study by investigators at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which found that 1 in 5 workers is highly engaged but having high burnout too.  In other words, these highly motivated, enthusiastic workers who were passionate about their work were also experiencing significant burnout - higher even than unengaged workers.  More importantly, these workers were the most likely to leave the organization!  Again, "optimal effort=maximum results".

4.  Encourage 85% right decisions: We don't need to make a perfect decision all the time.  Most leaders, myself included, tend to be perfectionists.  We are all afraid of making mistakes.  McKeown again mentions a study about adaptive and maladaptive perfectionists.  Research by Brian Swider, Dana Harari, Amy Breidenthal, and Laurens Bujold Steel (see "The Pros and cons of perfectionism, according to research" in Harvard Business Review) distinguish between excellence-seeking perfectionism and failure-avoiding perfectionism.  The former describes individuals who hold high standards for themselves and others, while the latter describes individuals who continually worry that their work is not sufficient or adequate.  Swider and colleagues also recognize that there are positive aspects to perfectionism, as well as negative ones.  The positive effects are stronger for those excellence-seeking perfectionists, while the negative effects are stronger in the failure-avoiding perfectionists.  Perhaps the best way to take advantage of the positive effects and mitigate the negative ones is to encourage "85% right" decisions.

5.  Watch-out for high-pressure language: Avoid the use of high-pressure terms such as "Urgent", "ASAP", or "Need" in email or text communications.  I would also add "Gentle Reminder" to this list.  McKeown suggests fostering open communication about genuine deadlines, the rationale behind these deadlines, and the potential trade-offs that can or should be made.  

6.  End meetings 10 minutes early: See my previous post ("Has technology really improved our lives?") about the intriguing results of the Microsoft Human Factors Lab's study on the use of breaks between virtual meetings.  

7.  Set your own intensity to 85%: Building upon the point made above about email and text communication after hours or on the weekends, leaders need to model the right behaviors when it comes to the 85% effort and work-life integration.  Surprisingly, as I mentioned in a previous post that mentions the book, Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal, we can learn a lot about group politics and behavior by observing primate groups.  Researchers in a classic study found that baboons look to their alpha male (the "boss" of the group, if you will) every 20-30 seconds to see what he is doing.  In other words, the rest of the baboons in the group model the behavior of the alpha male.  Leaders in all organizations are always "on display" - what they say and do matters.

McKeown writes, "Despite some companies' attempts, we can't fix today's burnout culture with a wellness app.  What it takes, is a mindset and culture shift among managers and organizations everywhere."  Applying the "85% rule" would be a great step in the right direction.