As managers and leaders start thinking about strategizing and making plans for 2007, it's worthwhile to pause and see what awaits us in 2007 and beyond.
All organizations, public and private face an increasing turbulent external environment, which can be described as uncertain, ambiguous and full of anomalous weak signals and equivocal cues that suggest disconnected, irregular change instead of smooth, incremental, evolutionary change that was characteristic of the last 30 years in business and government. This new complex dynamic requires us to rethink and challenge our conventional approaches and assumption to strategy and strategic thinking. Increasing uncertainty leads to anxiety, cognitive confusion and to a hyper-cautious state that paralyzes organizations and its leader into inactivity and a yearning for maintaining what we know --the status quo. Alternatively, if we ignore our complex environment, and the anomalies and cues that do not conform to our current business models or existing mental models, we are in danger of seeing at the very least, a growth in inflexibility and corporate hubris in step with a drop in institutional resilience, if not a misplaced over-confidence behind key decisions, a string of which could be fatal for many organizations.
Paraphrasing, Alex Wright, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton Business School in the UK, one challenge facing our leaders and decision-makers in 2007 is to be better prepared for accelerating uncertainty and for managers to make sense of new situations and phenomena (separating threats and opportunities) and to develop a perceptive of the future based on cognitive pluralism, instead of naive determinism.
David Pollard is his blog noted the same escalating tendency. In a post entitled World of Uncertainty he writes on Dec 22, 2006:
"Perhaps the counterpoint to my point Tuesday about the need for ‘less talk and more action’ is the need to embrace complexity and, with it, uncertainty, including uncertainty about what to do. An editorial in today’s NYT by a theology professor expresses alarm about the author’s perception that there is an increasing demand for certainty and absolutism in our society, and an increasing intolerance not only for opposing orthodoxy but also for ambiguity, ambivalence, and compromise."
"This inflexibility and lack of resilience is the sign of a society that is growing increasingly unhealthy and unable to adapt to changing realities. It manifests itself in nostalgia for simpler times and a lazy propensity to seek and settle for simple answers, where there are none, or at least not any that work. It’s understandable as we grow increasingly impatient at our inability to bring about urgently-needed change, but doctrinaire thinking tends to work only for those who want no change – you can win converts for the status quo, because there’s only one status quo, but the minute you start to preach one single change prescription for the world’s problems you face opposition and resistance not only from conservatives but from other progressives who want to go forward in a different direction. Complexity precludes achieving broad consensus on What to do. That’s depressing, because it reduces the probability that we’ll be able to bring about any meaningful change before our civilization collapses from its excesses, so it’s something most progressives don’t want to admit, or even think about."
In light of what David Pollard summarizes above, we should be placing far more emphasis on ignorance management, which is a much broader and larger domain, then knowledge management.
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