Complexity occurs when there are multiples of elements and drivers, each with their own forces and directions that impact other elements around them. People, cultures, understandings, organizational constraints, systems, and tools are some of the impacting elements that are compounded by scale along with many other factors. Each of the forces is impacting the others.
The Complexity Lenses pull the pieces apart to see them as they are and help leaders and their groups see and understand the problems, needs, and gaps more clearly. As you gain understanding through one lens, take that and set it aside and work through another lens. Then bring those understandings together to get more clarity. Most often, the Lenses and the working through seeing the situation as it is and the areas that need attention and solving haven’t been seen nor in focus. This leads to much better planning, starting to work through solutions with workflows, processes, team alignment, and tools that actually fit the needs.
The Complexity Lenses are a collection (more than 90) of actual framings of foundational understandings and their related elements and components. The complexity lenses are used to help those in enterprise and/or in product and system management see and then understand their problems, needs, and gaps (as well as successes) more easily. These lenses have sub-elements, and many of the elements have components that help tease out seeing and getting to better understandings.
Most enterprises quickly find themselves knee-deep (or deeper) in a fog of complexity. It is rare that enterprises, or product and system teams, have the breadth and depth to have the framing and understanding to work through the complex set of forces and realities they are sitting in. The Complexity Lenses help to broadly and deeply augment organizations and teams’ understandings to see clearly through the fog of complexity.
Product leaders, system owners, and organizations are trying to get better, but lack the understanding of what their issues are that they are needing to address. Far too often we move to solutions without understanding the problems and needs, then working through how to address those findings with solutions. Once the problems, gaps, and needs are better understood, the paths to getting to solutions that actually work better with better tool selection, improving workflows, and/or processes.
In the 25+ years of building, designing, and guiding digital and social, I’ve brought lessons learned and foundations from grad school in public policy with a solid depth of understanding and framing from social science and understandings at scales. I started collecting the lenses around 2008 from my prior work and initially called them Social Lenses, even though many went beyond just the natural complexity of human social interactions and their environments.
Seeing Clearly Through the Fog of Complexity
The focus of the lenses is to see clearly through the fog of complexity. Leaders, decision makers, managers, and interested parties often are frustrated that their spending on solutions don’t improve the situation. This frustration quite often is adjacent to “we are missing some understanding”.
A large focus of the lenses is to pull apart many compounding elements with their forces, interests, and needs so that individual lenses can be framed properly and their related elements and components. When everything is viewed as a whole it is really difficult to understand the:
- Problems
- Gaps
- Pain point
- Needs
- Interests
The Complexity Lenses help the people in the organization see the compound areas to address with improved understanding. This becomes the foundation for having much better criteria for planning and finding solutions that address these areas to actually solve them.
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