Don’t worry about swimming with the sharks. Worry about those jellyfish
The enemy approached. Facing insurmountable numbers, the Japanese deployed the razor net and sliced through them like paper. But the enemy’s numbers merely increased exponentially.
No, this isn’t some strange tale from World War 2. This recent event occurred when a small army of Japanese fishing boats tried desperately to plough through the ever increasing number of jellyfish decimating entire ecosystems of sea life.
What the Japanese didn’t anticipate was that attacking jellyfish only triggers an evolutionary mechanism which causes them to breed even more rapidly.
Each day, we make decisions that are no different from the frustrated Japanese fisherman. We confront our problems head on with force, deploying countermeasures and controls to prevent them recurring. Yet, the same problems seem to persevere and sometimes they generate other issues as well.
What we are often doing is targeting the symptoms not the cause.
Take the jellyfish conundrum. Pollution and overdevelopment along coastlines provide a rich and fertile environment for these great survivors to breed. We then overfish most of their natural predators and wipe out the rest with further pollution.
The jellyfish are now in a position to devour whole ecosystems.
In our workplaces the ecosystem is becoming more complex with people complaining about endless red tape and new roles being created to manage the chaos. A common way to address this perceived lack of order is to increase focus on compliance. You know the drill. Increase accountability, oversight, performance monitoring, procedures etc.
Unfortunately, like jellyfish, employees are resistant and adaptive. Their non-compliance triggers greater scrutiny and monitoring. And when you’re looking for problems, you tend to find them. The deviations from rules, therefore, appear to escalate even more. More controls are put in place which need monitoring and attention.
Meanwhile, because management are paying such close attention to every nuance of operations, the employees lose ownership of their tasks and activities. They become disengaged because they can’t genuinely get behind all these management obligations.
Managers introduce programs to improve employee engagement and reduce turnover, fuelling more complexity, roles, and approaches to measure and monitor employee performance. We’ve created a thriving ecosystem of complexity.
At the heart of fixing these issues is an approach called ‘systems thinking’. This approach allows us to map the real issues of the organisation and treat it like the ecosystem it is.
Lack of uniformity and inconsistent operations, for example, may not be really the problem. The systems map may reveal that the leaders haven’t set a clear and inspiring vision. Maybe they’ve been spending too much time deploying the razor net?
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