Managing Complexity

Abstract

All previous chapters point in the same direction: Social systems are insensitive to most managerial efforts to alter their behavior yet they do have a few sensitive influence points through which behavior can be changed. But even if behavior changes, such change is not necessarily the one managers and policymakers want to bring about. From the banal—“we need to increase revenues by 10% next year”—to the sophisticated, “we need to become more innovative” or “we need to stop climate change,” business and government lore is full of decisions that never materialize. Phil Rosenzweig (2007) analyzed how managers let themselves be deceived by simple recipes for success. Is the very idea that management and governance exists a myth? Are social systems really manageable?

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle … is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities