Unusually Happy Children

There was something about the children pictured in the photo attached to this CBC story about Kindergarten registration that made me think “those don’t look like real Prince Edward Island children.”

I’m not sure what it was – were they too happy? sitting too attentively? equipped with unusual musical instruments? – but it turns out I was right: the children are generic Preschool Children in a Music Class from iStockphoto:

The cover of the report is not of Island Kids but is a stock photo. No big thing really but symptomatic of the approach I think.

What I did find that made me think more was that the much touted "consultation" with parents and the public of 800 was in fact only 40. The rest was the online survey.

No real debate - no real conversation before hand is what is making the roll out so hard. Few of the really pragmatic and testing questions have even been asked until now.

Suggests that the result was agreed on before the work began.

Key is that all involved missed the fact that creating a new human system is a complex not a simple of complicated thing. That with a complex thing the outcome cannot be predicted - it has to emerge as the result of conversation and trial and error.

You need time to do this. But they have offered no time.

In the book More Space, Johnnie Moore defines the complicated and complex as follows:

"The wiring on an aircraft is complicated. To figure out where everything goes would take a long time. But if you studied it for long enough, you could know with (near) certainty what each electrical circuit does and how to control it. The system is ultimately knowable. If understanding it is important, the effort to study it and make a detailed diagram of it would be worthwhile.

So complicated = not simple, but ultimately knowable.

Now, put a crew and passengers in that aircraft and try to figure out what will happen on the flight. Suddenly we go from complicated to complex. You could study the lives of all these people for years, but you could never know all there is to know about how they will interact. You could make some guesses, but you can never know for sure. And the effort to study all the elements in more and more detail will never give you that certainty.

So complex = not simple and never fully knowable. Just too many variables interact.

Managing humans will never be complicated. It will always be complex. So no book or diagram or expert is ever going to reveal the truth about managing people.

But don’t panic. We can manage people if..."

You can't control complex systems. It's a mathematical impossibility. The Conant-Ashby Theorem: "Every good regulator of a system must have a model of that system." leads to the Law of Requisite Variety: "That the available control variety must be equal to or greater than the disturbance variety for control to be possible", which is to say, that the control mechanism of a thing must be more complex than the thing being controlled. 

The analogy to business is that managers often want to see new initiatives as complicated when they are in fact complex, and thus design complicated systems to manage the change. Which usually fail miserably in very short order when they encounter a circumstance outside of the control model.

The problem with designing control mechanisms for organizational change management is that the system being controlled consists of the entire contents of the minds of the effected group!  That is the epitome of a complex system.

This is why it all feels so bad. Only now are the questions that should have been raised in the consultation process coming to light.