The Architecture of Complexity

The Architecture of Complexity

The title of this post references a 1962 paper by Herbert A. Simon, in which he wades into the studies of systems. In my last post about patterns and connections, I identified the existential challenge of being a building architect in a room full of computer, information, systems and integration architects. Computer scientists were led to patterns and connections by a building architect writing in the 1970s. Computer architects have created an amazing world around patterns and complexity, so at this point in the story, it makes sense that, to reintroduce architects to their extended family. This re-introduction will take place within the haunts of the Cynefin.

Cynefin design tools.

Guiding complexity within a project is like teaching a kindergarten class. In their influential paper Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World, Snowden and Kurtz outline the challenges of attempting to manage the unmanageable events. Their paper was focused on organizational knowledge exchange, decision-making, and strategy, but it could have easily been applied to large design and construction projects. Large project-based work is known to be self-organizing. Each participant brings the necessary skillsets and self-direction that exponentially adds to the creation of a larger team. However, the project control tools for managing large physical construction projects have not maintained pace with the needs of the complex project.

Cynefin is a framing system that outlines the non-management approach to complexity. Cynefin is a Welsh word for Habitat or Haunt. Haunt is actually a wonderful descriptor for the Cynefin sense-making tool, because large complex projects often feel haunted to their participants. Haunted by unknown forces that can radically change the project direction. Cynefin is familiar to most people from the Donald Rumsfeld quote “Known unknowns”. The Cynefin framework even dives into the unknown unknowns, going from ordered to unordered (through disorder) identifying how to respond to events: Simple -sense, categorize, and respond. Complicated: Sense, analyze and respond. Complex: probe, sense, and respond, and Chaotic: Act, Sense, Respond.

Project teams can use Cynefin to identify and understand how to respond to the level of complexity that the wrong response may serve to embed future hauntings within the project later. Using the Cynefin map the project team will learn to identify and approach the entire project or the project’s individual activities, from where they may be located on the Cynefin map, and plan the resources and skillsets accordingly. 

Mission and Vision drive complex projects.

Complexity encompasses the unknown unknowns. However, traditional project management tools for design and construction fall within the “Known knowns” map. The desk-bound computer design tools are starting to enable understanding known-unknowns, but the field management tools focus on simple project control tools- Timely responses to RFIs, return of submittals, and focus on schedules and pay applications. While these processes and activities are important, they are unable to control the larger, complex project issues (which include the uncontrollable known-unknowns), and cannot see the chaos of the unknown squared. Believing that managing a project through simple project controls diminishes the ability of the team to recognize the larger project complexity issues that should be used as the markers for the project. Using Cynefin as each activity is begun, will facilitate how to plan and guide individual or collective activities with a clearer understanding of their complexity potential. Framing the tool within the transcendent Mission and Vision goals assists the project team control the parts of the project it can, and guide the parts of the project that suffer from (or enjoy) more self-adapting complexity.

Understanding complexity in a project team context.

Large projects take years to design and construct. And while there are discrete tasks that demand simple controls, these tasks combined always exponentially integrate into a larger potentially chaotic project. Team members within these large are self-organizing. They break into small easy to self-manage groups and work to fulfill their individual and collective interests. The Cynefin aware owner will build a collocated BA space, encouraging all team members to rub shoulders and solve problems within the tense confines of several bolted together construction trailers. These issue-solving integrated teams will triage urgent and important matters and bring them to conclusion within the confines of immersion.

However, always the challenge with these small problem solving teams is that there is often integrate reason for them to look up and sense that they are part of a larger system role. In other words, their decisions tend to solve the individual group problems, but cannot cascade up into the project whole. This is where a project becomes haunted. While we do our best to fit team members into self-adapting and scaling teams. We need project memory to remind the team of the purpose of their involvement. How do we build memory into a system that is built on spontaneous reactions to events, and dependent on individual member expertise and skillsets?

Building memory into a system.

Project hauntings occur when events overwhelm the project’s cause, and systems effects take place and the project teams protect themselves at the expense of the project’s mission and vision, and make decisions which affect the current or future outcomes. The team forgets that it is just a neighborhood within the village which raising a child and instead focuses on its immediate emotional needs. A bad decision is made, a second-guess is left unguessed, pay-apps are reduced, change-orders denied or forwarded without review. Ghosts are deposited for later hauntings, which the traditional command and control activities only enable.

Re-energizing the individual associated teams through the sense-making activities of the Cynefin provide an opportunity to transform projects, creating purpose.