From the Coach's Desk

This past week, I found myself reflecting on a pattern I see often with senior leaders. We celebrate decisiveness, clarity, and expertise...and rightly so.

These qualities help leaders cut through complicated challenges with skill. But every so often, a problem arrives that refuses to yield to expertise. The more you push, the more it shifts. The more you try to solve it, the more it reshapes itself.

These are complex problems.

In my years as an advisor at the UAE Prime Minister's Office, building the leadership and organizational muscle to solve complex problems was an ongoing priority.

Today I'd like to share some things you can do that can help you deal with complexity.

Wissam

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Leadership in times of complexity

The job of leaders is to grapple with many different types of challenges, and to find ways through. Leaders often pride themselves in, and are rewarded for, their ability to cut through challenges toward a clear future vision.

But there are problems that seem to defy anyone’s ability to tackle. In my years at the UAE Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), we often grappled with problems that were called “wicked problems.” These problems were a little like the whack-a-mole arcade game: every time you smacked a challenge down in one place, a new one popped up somewhere else. Reducing the prevalence of diabetes is an example of a complex policy problem.

Have you had to deal with challenges like this in your organization?

An important consideration when working through leadership and organizational challenges is understanding the kind of challenge that you’re dealing with.

The Cynefin framework provides a useful map to understand the different domains of challenges, so you can choose an appropriate response. But often where leaders struggle is in noticing when they cross the line from the predictable to the unpredictable domain. This is where challenges go from being complicated and become complex.

In the “Complicated” domain, there’s a predictable and repeatable connection between cause and effect. But there are often many steps in between, and understanding the link requires expertise. Examples of issues in the complicated domain include managing an engineering project, or figuring out the best operations infrastructure to ensure on-time parcel delivery. These are not trivial challenges, and different people might have different opinions about the best way to address them. But there is enough predictability that most people with the right expertise will generally agree on the broad strokes of the approach to be followed.

In the “Complex” domain, the world becomes unpredictable. Here, there are too many variables, and they interact with each other in ways that are difficult to anticipate. This makes it almost impossible to predict what will happen next. Developing a strategy for your company, or figuring out how to reduce diabetes prevalence, fall into the complex domain. Many research hours are spent trying to reverse engineer successes in the complex domain, such as why Apple is successful and how others might replicate that success. But leaders know that strategies that worked in the past may no longer continue to be effective.

Most leadership challenges fall in the complicated domain, and most leaders spend their early years honing strategies for these kinds of problems. Over time, they become adept at navigating expertise-heavy, step-by-step problem solving.

But strategies developed for the complicated domain fail in the face of complex challenges. Complicated problems reward expertise, analysis, and optimization. Complex challenges, by contrast, demand experimentation, adaptation, and a willingness to learn in real time. You cannot engineer your way through complexity with more analysis or tighter controls—the system will resist, adapt, and surprise you. What’s needed instead is a mindset that values probing, testing, sensing patterns, and iterating forward.

So how can leaders work with complexity more effectively? Here are three practical approaches:

1. Run small experiments instead of big bets. Test different approaches in low-risk ways, and use the feedback to adapt. Complexity doesn’t reward certainty, it rewards learning.
2. Listen to weak signals. Pay attention to early signs, outlier voices, or unexpected results. In complex systems, the faintest signal can carry the biggest future impact.
3. Create adaptive spaces. Build forums where diverse perspectives can meet, share, and challenge each other. New insights emerge when different parts of the system are in dialogue.

The lesson for leaders is simple, but not easy: don’t rely on yesterday’s toolkit to meet today’s complexity. The leader’s task is to recognize the shift in the ground beneath their feet and to respond with curiosity, humility, and courage.

Because the complex world requires adaptability, not certainty.