Understanding complex settings and dynamic organizations
Structuring the ecosystem and reducing complexity
Bringing order to chaos
How mathematics helped me to find the beauty in complex and dynamic organizations
After more than 15 years in professional business context and more than 40 years on earth, I finally understood my personal WHY. Why I am who I am, my personal vision. It is the answer to the question about what drives me. What makes me get up each and every morning and continue on my endeavors?
“Bringing order to chaos!”
It is about understanding complex organizations. Structuring complex situations. Understanding group dynamics and controlling highly dynamic and diverse systems.
You might think “Bringing order to chaos” sounds a bit too harsh. Are we really living in chaos today? Isn’t there any structure in our microcosm? For sure, the world isn’t only black and white. There is a lot of grey. Nevertheless, we do better understand black and white. And bold message makes a much better vision than a grey softened one.
Our world and especially the business ecosystems are becoming more and more complex year by year, month by month and sometimes day by day. Take globalization for example, even small size companies enjoy today the benefits from selling to customers all over the world, sourcing from suppliers all over the world and hiring a divers ad multicultural workforce. All those benefits come at the expense of increased dynamics and complexity. Technology and digitalization play the role of a booster rocket. Just consider the speed of interaction thanks to (mobile) phones, emails, text messages. Now we are on the same page.
My journey started with mathematics. For me mathematics is an art of bringing order to chaos. Mathematics structures complex environments to describe solutions for pressing questions. First of all you look out for some kind of logic to describe the system, some fundamentals and rules of behavior like natural numbers (1, 2, 3,…) and their operators (+, -, *, /). Now you can leverage this to derive specific properties of this system and to solve the issue. Once you have a structure, it usually becomes easier to think and talk about the system and to exchange ideas.
Let’s bring this one back to business environments and organizations, which is basically the interaction of people. Leaders and executives often face situations like: We need to increase A or grow in the direction of B. We need to change the behavior of our team. Easy said. The underlying question is: Why do they behave the way they behave? What in the current ecosystem makes them behave the way they behave? It is understanding the system, the complexity of the current organization with all its heritage and finding a solution. It is bringing order to chaos.
I enjoy complexity. It is a challenge to find some structure in it. Once you found a structure it usually displays some beauty which is very fulfilling as beauty always is. Then it comes to reduce the complexity and to make it manageable and controllable. This way you derive sustainable and agile organizations able to deliver sustainable value. Which leads us directly to my mission, the HOW: Transforming and enabling organizations.