Complexitisation: The greatest threat to personal and organisational change

I have chosen to create this word, ‘Complexitisation’ to illustrate a fundamental set of human activities that create enormous barriers to change at both the individual and organisational levels.

Complexitisation is a rich concept! Here is an example to illustrate its impact:

A new graduate is recruited for a junior management accounting position in a manufacturing firm. From day one, the graduate is barraged with a torrent of new employer expectations, business rules and processes, cultures, human relationships, technologies, and defining situations that shape their understanding of their work environment and themselves.

To survive in this environment, the graduate must attend to many things. Unfortunately, attention is guided primarily by self-concerns about performance. In the end, they want to be part of the team and they want to be held in esteem by their workmates. They remember what brings self-assurance, comfort, strength, authority, and control to theirs and others lives and these experiences compound and aggregate as a representation of themselves – to themselves, and to others around them. The processes they have been through are what I call complexitisation, which is the continuous growth and clustering of experience and meaning around a set of activities, tempered by emotional and social circumstances.

Now, how does complexisation impact on the graduate’s (now senior employee’s) ability to change?

When the senior employee is faced with a challenging, new situation that requires change, they use a complex network of knowing to navigate through the situation. They now judge the situation from multiple perspectives and consider multiple alternatives. They “rationalise the situation, they pre-measure the likely impact and risk on their personal comfort, continued success and self-belief. In effect, the emotional scares of prior victories and failures bubble up. The senior manager, when faced with the overload of the situation goes back to the ingrained mental structures that have served them well in the past – HABIT.

Therefore, complexitisation leads to a looping downward spiral of behaviours. The more the senior employee is confronted with the new situation, the more likely they will provide the same simplistic and habitual response.

Ironically, the senior employee will tend to complexitise the reasoning for their habitual response with superfluous data and information dredged up from a range of different sources. Deep analysis and “information warfare” add unneeded complexity to the decision making process. At the same time, these processes are making the senior employee feel safer and more in-control of the change situation.

I chose the word complexitisation to illustrate this process – you were faced with a new word (probably with a deal of cynicism and discomfort!) As you read through my description, you took your own circumstances into account and tried to match them with my definition and example, and now (perhaps) you are faced with the option to either “discount” or “act.”

If you have decided to “act:”

The first step to reducing the influences of complexitisation is to recognise and re-evaluate our HABITS, which requires you to reflect on whether those habits are really worth holding onto as the truth. The second step is to ask those you work with for their observations on your behaviour. If you are a manager, open up the conversation (gently) with your team. Being a leader is acknowledging your own weaknesses and actively trying to address them in ways that model good personal change behaviours to your direct reports. You will be surprised how they will respond if this process is done with sensitivity and forthrightness.