Context matters
Or why past success does not assure as bright of a future…
If you are into football, the real one that you actually play with your feet (yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek teasing for my American friends – and just that you know, I am big fan of ‘American football’…), and somehow follow the Premier League, you might have thought of this yourself. That we might be seen the end of an era of Jürgen Klopp at the command of Liverpool FC, with a struggle to deliver similar level of performance this season.
What would justify that? How come, all of a sudden, he might have lost his handle at it? The squad has had changes, but not in too profound ways. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It is counterintuitive, to say the least.
Yet in practice, often that is exactly what happens, if we really think about it. It is just that we tend to prefer to see the patterns of when things go right and attempt to map out why was that the case. A lot of business writing these days, and in fact even designed methodologies (or frameworks) which are sold in certifications schemas, are nothing else than mapping patterns of success as if they were things you can just transplant somewhere else, and they will work.
But reality (because human systems are inherently complex) is context relevant. Context not only matters, but it is what ‘makes or breaks’ certain things to work in certain circumstances and fail in others. That is the very nature of emergence – similarly to how evolution works, what turns out to be more useful in a given context, is what will thrive and get naturally reinforced and will eventually prevail through time.
It does not mean it will always be the case. Even if circumstances are fairly comparable. That is also because the smallest change, in a complex adaptive system (see more on this in my previous post on ecology as better metaphor for organization and work systems), may propagate in impactful and unpredictable ways, and most certainly will generate unintended consequences. It is not out of the blue that we have the saying on the “road to hell being paved by good intentions”.
So, we are screwed then, essentially?...Subject to random and cheer luck, or something?
We certainly are if we ever think that the way to approach it is by always making fundamental changes, and too many of those at once. There are other (and better) ways of doing it though. Which I plan to explore further in upcoming issues. But just to not let you completely in a vacuum, two key ideas for you to think about: granularity as a foundation and evolutionary (incremental) change.
Got intrigued?... Then keep an eye on this, subscribe, engage – I will surely like to “hear” your thoughts or just “hear” your feedback on what I am doing here.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact.
As one of your American friends :), I found your thoughts to be profound. I know in American Football, it's a copycat league. If you see one team doing something a certain way and they win the Super Bowl, other's follow that same approach, without understand the context of the way the team did what they did. They also may not have the right people in place to execute the same approach. I see that in business where it works at one of these big tech companies so we should be able to follow the same logic by hiring some of their people to implement it without taking into account the people/culture you already have in place, need to change. As you said doing a lot of change at once has unintended consequences.