Complexity Is Not The Problem, Panic Is

If you think of an of a car, of a motor engine, or even a very um constrained environment like a zoo, things are connected in ways that are predictable and they connect also in ways that they don't really change each other, you know. So if you think of a car, if I connect the clutch to the gears, the clutch remains the clutch and the gears remain the gears. They just, you know, get a a higher order functionality. But when two people connect, like just the two of us connecting in this space, this conversation and this interaction changes both of us.

And all of the people who are listening to this, they will probably also be impacted and changed. So that rich interconnectivity is the hallmark of complexity. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders, a podcast by Triple Gold. We share deep transformational conversations around leadership and personal development to help you uncover the unseen facets of human growth and leadership impact.

I'm your host, Michael Bunting. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders. This is Michael Bunting, and I'm really excited to interview our guest today, Sonia Blichnow from South Africa, which is my own origins. And we're talking today about complexity.

Sonia, would you just quickly give us a two-minute intro on you and how you came to be fascinated with and work with complexity and helping leaders navigate complexity? Sure. Um, thanks, Michael, and thanks for the invitation. Um, yeah, so I'm based in South Africa, and I think my uh fascination or love affair with complexity started very young before I had language for it.

So looking back on my life, I realized that I've always kind of been in the liminal, even little things like I went to school a year before all my peers. I was born late in my parents' lives. So I I've always had this experience of being in liminal spaces, which is where that immediately puts you in complexity. And then I studied meteorology after school, and so I went into the natural sciences.

That, you know, also is in the world of complexity. I immediately knew it wasn't really for me. And so I left the Weather Bureau after three years. I did some computer programming, I went into web design.

I have a creative streak. So I on the side I had a professional wedding photography business, which is also quite complex, if you want to hear about that. All of those family dynamics. Then in around 2000 and 2003, I was in IBM.

Uh I was a consultant there, and I met Professor Dave Snowden. We were in IBM at the same time. And that was when um he was just formalizing his work on the Kinevan framework. And I remember sitting in an internal conference, he was presenting a workshop and hearing him speak about complexity, and that was when I first got the language for what I've always been living.

And I kind of got myself onto the first consulting projects here in South Africa using that methodology. And I very soon realized that this is not going to fly in a traditional consulting company like IBM, because complexity is just kind of its opposite traditional consulting organization's business model, because complexity says every context is unique, and consulting organizations want to sell best practice and recipes. And so I left IBM after a few years, and I've been consulting and navigating complexity independently ever since then.

So I've kind of been in the in complexity all my life, as I believe all humans are, but I've been in the field for about 25 years. So yeah, that's right. Thank you. So okay, no, great.

And I've immediately got questions. So I having studied Dave's model as well, would you please, in your words, explain what you mean by complexity? I like using metaphors for this because, you know, as um as you've mentioned, you know, in our earlier chat also, you know, it can become very vague when you talk about complexity. You know, and I think sometimes it's it's the fault also of theorists and practitioners who almost make it compli more complex than it's than it ought to be.

So I'm gonna start with a with an analogy. And a few years ago I wrote a blog post that um the headline was It's hard to survive in the jungle if you were trained in a zoo. That analogy for me really works to almost bring across this difference between order or complicated order in in Dave's language and complexity. When something is complex, complexity sits in the in the relationship between things.

The complexity sits in the in-between. And so whenever there is deep interrelationships, when things are connected in ways, you know, that's not the same way that a machine connects. So if you think of an of a car, of a motor engine, or even a very constrained environment like a zoo, things are connected in ways that are predictable and they connect also in ways that they don't really change each other. You know, so if you think of a car, if I connect the clutch to the gears, the clutch remains the clutch and the gears remain the gears.

They just, you know, get a higher order functionality. But when two people connect, like just the two of us connecting in this space, this conversation and this interaction changes both of us. And all of the people who are listening to this, they will probably also be impacted and changed. So that rich interconnectivity is the hallmark of complexity.

And so a jungle or a natural environment, any ecosystem is complex. Things are connected in ways we can't fully understand. They are connected in ways that's nonlinear. So small things can have big impacts.

Could you give us an example? Give us an example of a small thing and a big impact and an unexpected connection. So if you think, for example, in an organizational system, so you do a lot of work with leadership and organizational systems, you can have a really big multi-million dollar change initiative with all of the posters that go up on the walls and everything. I mean, you're you're familiar with this, and it makes absolutely no difference.

One rumor can go like wildfire through that organization and change everything. Here in South South Africa, I'll give you another example. One of our insurers had a very irate customer who decided he's going to make a big, like a mobile billboard on the back, you know, and and um he put it on a trailer and he was like driving all around the country, telling everybody how bad this insurer is. One bad customer experience.

And he was he was on the news, he was in all the newspapers, it had this like oversized effect. So, you know, that is one example of something nonlinear that has a big impact. And unexpected connections, you know, I people would always say they let's use the smoker's balcony. Serendipity happens, you know, when people meet who would not necessarily have interactions, you know, and I remember from my corporate days, people who didn't smoke, who would actually hang out on the smoker's balcony and stand there and puff because of the connections that form there.

And I think it's one of the things that while I really enjoy being able to work virtually, because it allows me to do things like this, when we are not co-located in a place, we no longer have these unexpected meetings. We no longer run into somebody next to the water cooler or in the coffee area and have a conversation that that one conversation shifts everything. So serendipity is also very much part and parcel of human complex systems. Give me an example that happened.

I I I teach on Sydney University's MBA program, transformational leadership. And we ask, one of the assignments we give the students is we ask them to go and map the behaviors that are not supporting good outcomes. So, for example, people are don't tell the truth and they're conflict avoided. Simple.

And they usually come up with up to 10 different behaviors. And then we ask them to go and investigate why that behavior is there. Because the behavior itself is not supporting the organizational outcomes, so it's nonsensical in a way that it should be there. So why is it there?

And then they'll look at systems and internal beliefs and so forth. One of their students had this really amazing example where they said they they noticed that there was a lot of competitiveness between departments, which was undermining perform overall performance of the business. So what they did is they they brainstormed a new reward system where peer-to-peer-to-peer would reward, would nominate people for how their levels of collaboration or rate them, and that would constitute some form of connection to their bonus.

And so when he was mapping the red zone behaviors, he saw too many people in meetings, over collaboration, right? And so it was like death by committee in his organ. He's like, this is interesting. There's why is this behavior there?

And then he tracked it back to this reward system. So it was reward system done with the best intentions. It was like, okay, people are competing too much. Why don't we come up with a a system to force more or encourage more collaboration?

But then it it revered the other way to, you know, death by committee. From my understanding, that is a comp it's like an unexpected, it it's it makes sense from a linear perspective. Oh yeah, you do this, you do that. And then it's got these unexpected outcomes, and you go, oh gosh, would that constitute from your perspective?

That's a complex example, example of complexity. You get this, you get this like it makes sense solution, you put it in, and then you get the opposite result. Unexpected, unintended consequences. I love the Aussies have a wonderful word for it.

They call it boomerang effects. Right. If you look in organizations, measurement systems most often are the generators of these perverse outcomes. I had a similar here in South Africa, one of our telecoms, and I think it's it's more widely used.

They linked their engagement survey to people's increases in bonuses. And so the more engaged and happy your your department is, the you know, the bigger the bonus. And you know, they they came out as like one of the happiest companies to work for in South Africa, and everybody knew like they were one of the worst. So when you make something explicit like that, people will game it.

Yeah. We people know how to game or how to navigate complexity. You know, I think this is the thing. We've kind of made it this mystical thing that sits outside of us that we need to make sense of, and the aspects of that is definitely true.

But every family is complex. When you go to a new when we were at school and we went into a new classroom, we had to navigate complexity. When you go to a social context and you're with your friends, you're navigating complexity. Human beings know how to do that.

And um, yeah, when something's explicit, they will game it. So my when I first came across the term complexity, I remember being struck by in the Kanafin model around the difference between simple problems, complicated problems, and complex problems. And I over the years I came to try and explain it. And I I remember we had a client that made microwave popcorn.

So I try to explain, I'm gonna give my idiot's guide and I'm gonna ask you, the expert, to correct me, please. I say, okay, what is a simple problem? Well, in an ideal world, all problems are simple because there's a manual for them, right? If and and that would be if the if the machine jams, right, there's a standard procedure.

There's an SOP for it, right? You go there, you follow the procedure, it unjams the belt, you're you're good to go. That's a simple problem. It's it becomes a complicated problem when the machine jams and you go through the SOP and it still doesn't work.

Now you need a technical person, an expert to come in and do that detailed analysis. And they have more expertise that's normal, and that's the complicated problem. And it's also what often we want all problems to be either simple or complicated, because there is either an SOP for it or there's a knight in shining armor somewhere that can come in and come and fix it. And I said, but then what would a complex problem look like for this customer, this pop pop microf popcorn company, would be now suddenly their market shares getting eaten alive because China is producing microf popcorn at 50% of the price.

The problem they have now is in order to survive, they have to get innovative and they have to do something different. And if they just go and get an expert somewhere to help them, well then the Chinese company can also get an expert that doesn't actually so now they're in the world where they have to do novel stuff, they have to innovate, and the only way to navigate that is lots of trials and experiments and changes. And that's the world of complexity where you no longer can find the knight in shining armor or the SOP to rescue you.

Help, you know, can you please re-educate me on that somewhat simplistic explanation to try and help people understand that you're not the key message is that when you're navigating complexity, you have to navigate it through trial and error, through experimenting, through open, through fluidity. You can't just go to your old set ways. You've got to be in touch with the environment and its signals and learning and flexing with the environment and have an open mind, or in mindfulness practice we call it the beginner's mind.

Your um example is really not bad, Michael. I think the the thing with simple versus complicated is sometimes, you know, and Dave also would also say this, sometimes that that boundary between simple and complicated is is a bit of a uh it's a subjective boundary in a way. Because for an expert, something can look really simple. You know, like even and for a complete novice, even if there is like an SOP and but getting that belt unstuck, you know, that your your example, it will already be complicated because I need to do some analysis.

I need to, if I'm a complete novice. So whether something is simple or complicated, you know, that's almost it depends on your level of expertise to some extent. But you know, like an even more simple example of something that's simple is if your your laptop won't start up. And it's, you know, have you checked the plug?

You know, that is like the like is it plugged into the wall socket? You know, that is like a really simple but something that's simple is is very routine and it's predictable and it's fully mapped out. So we're not learning anything new. And this is why we can automate things.

You know, I think this is we're seeing in organizations now with AI, for example, is with automation, the jobs that are genuinely simple and ordered are being shifted over into machines. You know, machines are doing that. With AI, it's starting to impact on complicated as well. So now we're seeing AI impacting on things like the law, on architecture, on even medical science, you know, anything where there's deep expertise required, but the outcome is still fully known.

And I think this is one of the key differences between order and complexity. So in in order, which it which would be complicated or simple. The key thing is that it's those systems are constrained in a way that outcomes are known in complicatedness. Sometimes we don't actually know how to get there.

We need to get some expertise in to know how to get there, but we know where we're going. And it's the moment you shift over into complexity, even as you know, with with your example of the market, all of a sudden the outcomes are not known. There are so many independent variables that we can't hold all of them in our minds. We may not even know what all of them are.

You know, and this is one of the things is when you start pulling the threads on something that's complex, you know, it becomes that analogy of a can of worms. Every time you pull on a thread, you kind of discover another thread. It's a little bit like trying to nail jello to a wall when you're dealing with something complex. And so you can't do it from a distance.

As you said as well, you need to be close to it, you need to be responding to it, you need to understand, for example, what are the constraints? What are the things, you know, like measurement systems are an excellent example here. It creates a constraint that creates a pattern on the surface. So, what are some of the constraints at play?

Um, you know, one of the best examples of something complex is raising a teenager. You know, raising a teenager, there can be so many books and everybody can have advice, but your particular household context and your teenager has a unique flavor of complexity that nobody else has else's has. And you know, to do that, parents do it naturally. We start working with constraints.

Like, do we give them a curfew? Do we, you know, like what can we do to actually start shaping how they behave within a particular context? So I think, and this is probably if there's one message to to people who want to, I think, understand this better, it's almost to say the moment you see complexity in general as a problem, and the moment you see it as something out there, and something that you don't have the skills to navigate, that is when it actually becomes a problem.

If you understand that just life is complex, you've been navigating it all your life, and many of the practices that you would do socially can also transfer into your work. I don't know if that makes sense. So maybe I can give you another example. Sometimes when I'm working with leaders, I'll say to them, write down or table down or note down the problems that you're currently frozen around, the current the problems that you currently look at them at the moment and like they're in the too hard basket, or the problems that you've thrown solutions at and they haven't worked.

Those are likely your big complex problems you're dealing with at the moment, right? And more often than not, they're frozen. You know, they're kind of waiting for the perfect conditions to do something, and then they just it just gets parked and parked and parked. And the next thing you know, that leader's being accused of being indecisive.

And uh I I saw something fascinating recently that the brain does not, we don't see reality. In fact, what the brain does, it projects old images of reality onto our current reality, and then it fills in the gap. So the brain itself is constantly trying to create patterns of order so that we can just chill and fall into like nice ordered patterns. And reality kind of keeps demanding we, you know, in our world, we use the term green red zone and green zone.

We say there's a part of the brain that's fast, it's fast pathway of the brain. It loves predictability and it loves like, you know, press eight at a red traffic light, you stop, green, you go. It loves that simplicity because it saves energy. But the moment we move into complexity, we have to let go, in some sense, of our our normal ways, our set patterns of relating.

And we have to kind of go into learning mode, right? Primarily. There has to be a kind of curiosity, fascination, openness with it. And then there's the willingness to stumble, fail, learn, get beaten up sometimes, but not see it as a fault.

I hate one of my one of my own team members recently. We offered a free assessment, free self-assessment for our assessment to people. I did a keynote talk and we had like 300 people took up the free assessment. We were very like, this is awesome.

And then we realized afterwards, oh my god, that was the worst thing to ever offer because free assessments don't really add value. What were we thinking? And I remember saying, oh my god, that was a mistake. And he said, No, that's excellent learning.

I was like, right. And it seems to be that's the the only kind of compassionate, useful attitude one can take because it's like you can't know until you know in complexity, isn't it? Even my example sounds silly, but you can't know it's not gonna work until it sometimes until it just doesn't work, or it does work, to your surprise. Yeah, one of my so my my work has evolved, you know, since working with Kinevan more towards wayfinding.

Because I think wayfinding is what we do in complexity. I love Tim Tim Ingold says wayfinding is knowing as you go, not before you go, which is basically what you just said. And that does, it requires us to hold our opinions and what we think we know lightly. And that's also why, you know, and this you would also be familiar with from a Knevin perspective, is in complexity we experiment, but we try and make things safe to fail.

So we do smaller things. We don't put all of our eggs in one basket. We sense and respond. We, you know, sometimes I feel feel it's almost like sowing seeds and seeing where is their fertile ground.

But one of the things that work against us often in complexity, and you know, this is where that boundary between complexity and chaos also becomes quite interesting, is sometimes we're forced to make fast decisions, and other times that can really work against us. And you know, this is something I see a lot in corporates, you know, especially with with leaders. They would do something, but then they don't actually give that something that they just did time to see what the effect is.

And so you see this often with change initiatives, you know, or with things like um restructurings. They would restructure, but then they don't give the new structure time to settle to actually bring about the change they were looking for. Then they'd go on to the next one and on to the next one. So timing is also, you know, an interesting thing in complexity.

One of my favorite authors, he was also South African, he died unfortunately a few years ago. He wrote a paper on the importance of a certain slowness. And he he made this, he had an analogy where he said, when you're cooking a steak, it's fast and on high heat. But when you're cooking a stew, it's slow and low heat.

And you need to be able to discern what is the correct timing here. And I think that is something else that especially, you know, when we're in a complicated environment where things are quite predictable, and well, some of the things that I've seen is we've almost started to worship going faster. You know, the agile movement, you know, all of these things that entered organizations, it's all about speed. And sometimes in complexity, you need to go slow before you go fast.

You need to really observe the system, be in it, kind of sit in it. And I think sometimes we've forgotten how to do that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I I was reading about maybe a year and a half or two years ago, I was reading a really arbitrary little book by Jim Collins called How the Mighty Fall.

It was uh it's a book, it's about this thick, but it's actually tiny. It's about this thick. It's like a little offshoot book that costs a fortune on Amazon. And and it's he he reversed the the, you know, he instead of studying what great companies did, he studied what are companies that like fail do and what brings on failure.

What was really interesting about that is in our Assessment one we measure 13 what we call red zone behaviors, 13 behaviors that we ha our research shows that they produce negative outcomes for the organization. One of those behaviors is reactive. It's a reactive, but it's not reactive, emotionally reactive. It's fear-based reactive.

And it's this thing you're talking about. It's this, it's like it's like headless chicken. I'll try everything and I'll do this and then I'll frustrate it and it's not working. Then I'll try the next thing.

And Collins's research shows that it accelerates the death of organizations. And it's very normal for us to come across leaders now who are hyper-reactive. And they'll even use terms like you can, you can't, you gotta you gotta leave no stone unturned, Michael. And it's like, yes, but you've drifted into now like a panic-based fuel like reactivity where there's no learning.

And when we we had a really successful project with a pharmaceutical company in Canada, and we were one of the goals was to become more of a learning organization. What was interesting for them is they reduced their priorities from 22 to seven. And in that, it's it it's so it's so paradoxical, isn't it? Because in the reduction of the priorities, they became more learning-centered and more successful.

And it's it it's I'm just trying to get my own words around what you're saying. It's like this slowing down thing, it seems to be the is the space to reflect and learn and examine what's going on instead of lurching in a panic-based to the next thing, which just creates more noise in the system. It feels more complex, weirdly enough, the system and more intense, and yet it's less effective. It actually, and and you know, the thing is what I've seen in organizations, so that freeze response that you so both the freeze and the reactive response in leadership, what it tends to create.

So I'll I'll give you one example. One of the um it was an investment bank, and they were in a space where they didn't know what to do. There was a lot of panic going on, and at senior level, they had 23 strategic initiatives, and it wasn't a very big bank. When 23 strategic initiatives that are of equal priority hits the rest of the organization, it becomes chaotic because people don't know what to do.

They've got competing priorities, they've got and working with that executive team, it was they they wanted to hedge all their bets because they didn't know which of these initiatives would work, so they wanted to do everything. And there's a there's a reason why in in the lean world, in agile in the lean world, they talk about limit your work in progress. Because, and it's that paradoxical thing. If you limit your work in progress, and what I often speak to leaders about is you need to limit change in progress.

Because if there's too much change in the system, it also creates this churn that in the end nobody can get anything done. But it's very difficult. You know, one of the practices that I love to introduce into organizations, it comes from the book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz and Linsky, where they talk about you need to get off of the dance floor and onto the balcony. And what I very often see is when there's pressure, when the business is not doing well, you know, when all of these things, when they really hit the complexity, leaders tend to spend too much time on the dance floor.

They get involved in operations, they they overcontrol, they actually create more complexity. When they should be taking a step back, get onto the balcony, because from the balcony you can see the patterns. You can see where are the openings on the dance floor that nobody's using. So we can send people there, or where are people clumping?

Where are they bumping against each other? You can see that from the balcony. You can't see it when you're on the dance floor. But I think for some for some leaders, we've kind of made you need to be busy all the time, you need to be decisive, you know, like you need to know what you're doing.

And that is dance floor behaviors. That's not balcony behaviors. Yeah. So one of the key things I think, you know, and I think it links also to your what you do with mindfulness is how do you create almost like a rhythm in an organization where the the leaders kind of have a routine of going to the balcony, looking at the patterns and not getting involved in the everyday operational nitty-nitty gritties and making it worse.

Yeah. So I I'm always trying to bring, and forgive me, Yesani, because I know it's probably it might not be suitable for complexity, but I have this extremely practic, practice-based mind. So, or the so what questions. I'm I I'm I'm quite committed to this in my own life.

It's like, okay, great. So what? So I'm trying to formulate it as you're speaking, as I'm learning with you. It's like, okay, so it sounds like to navigate complexity, the first order of business, if you will, is to acknowledge that we are learning as we're going.

We we we can't know for sure, and setting that ground for everybody. It's like, okay, we're learning as we're going. So then when things don't work, it's useful information, it's not quote unquote failure. And then there seems to be also a commitment to quieting the mind, not getting into frenetic fear-based reactivity, quieting the mind and bringing kind of curiosity into it and then a learning.

So it almost like if we had a reflex question every day when we we, I'm just guessing out loud here, by the way. It would be like if I was coaching someone who's navigating complexity, like one of my favorite questions might be what did you learn today? Really reflectively learn. And how are you adapting to that learning?

Feedback welcome on what I'm sharing. I'm just, I'm trying to give, like, if I'm a leader, I'm listening to this and I'm going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, man, it's complex. I'd love to come out of this podcast just having some a little bit more clarity and a couple of things I can do, at least not do, stop doing, like panicking and grabbing it too much and putting too much heat in the system. You can feel that for the listeners, I know I would propose everyone can know that.

I know that in myself. Um, I've got a problem right now, actually, in my business. I can feel this longing just to like lurch to the next idea, which is opposite to the current idea. And I'm like, no, no.

I I need to slow, I need to look, I need to learn, I need to think through it, I need to, and then I need to try another little thing. Not that's not the answer, but this next thing is going to be the answer. That reactive fear, I can feel it in myself going, no, like not going there. That's just asking for long-term pain and short-term pain.

How would you, how do you talk to yourself? How do you navigate, like, how do you coach yourself to navigate complexity when you're clearly about to fall into bad patterns of behavior? I think the the one thing that I do, so I'll probably start with, as you said, you know, like calm myself and take a step back. And then I would probably start with what year is truly complex.

So are there things that I actually can do something about? So if I'm an if I'm a leader in an organization, not somebody like me, that's only me, you know, like if I have people, there are still things that are genuinely simple and routine that I can delegate. There are still things that are complicated where I know the outcomes. And I think the LinkedIn post that that I wrote that you responded to, one of the things that we sometimes look at it as a leader and we think it's complexity, but actually what it is is overcomplicatedness.

Because over time, through all of our knee-jerk reactions, we've created this. Sometimes it's like a spaghetti of like really, really bad processes. Just somebody can untangle that because it's supposed to be complicated. It's not supposed to be complex.

Sometimes it even needs it's supposed to be simple. But because we've bolted on, you know, like unthinkingly very often, new systems and new processes, we've created this man-made overcomplication. And that can something can be done about that. So that would be the first thing is what is truly complex.

And and then the other thing is to speak really hard to myself and to say, Sonia, sit in the discomfort. Because very often what happens is leaders, and I'll speak for myself, I'm much better at solving the complicated and simple problems. I know how to do that. Yeah.

But if I'm a leader, that's not my job. So I need to sit in the discomfort of not knowing. And there, some of the questions I'd ask myself is where do you feel really certain now? And can you get quite suspicious of that certainty?

Because certainty in complexity is not necessarily like where could you be wrong? Like shift from certainty to curiosity. And where can I get really diverse perspectives? Because this is the other thing, is sometimes what we do is we go to people who think like us.

We go to people who can just make us feel more comfortable. We don't seek out the people who can increase the discomfort. So that's the other thing is where can I find people who would number one give me honest feedback who will actually tell me really what they're seeing in my, you know, in my um behavior or in the what's going on around me, and also people who see this particular situation very differently. And if I'm a leader in a large organization, I would also say to them, how can you get really close to the people who are close to the problem?

Because very often they are the ones who understand or who knows what can be done, but we distance ourselves from the front line. I created with a friend of mine who's also into mindfulness an acronym called cool. So you need to be cool in complexity. And cool stands for the C is for courage, and courage is not bravery.

Sometimes it's courage to say, I don't know. I don't know, I'm the leader, I don't know. We're gonna find out together. Or it's the courage to expose yourself to different perspectives, or the courage to let go.

Sometimes we are so invested in an initiative that's not working. We don't want to end it. So, you know, that's another the second or the first O is openness. You've already mentioned that.

Can I can I be open to learning, to unlearning? Can I practice a beginner's mind? I love Keats with his negative capability. You know, can I step into negative capability and not bring all of my assumptions to this?

The third or the third, the second O and the third letter in cool is observe. And I think that very strongly links to the work that you do. But it's observing, kind of getting that balcony perspective, zooming in and out, like observing the context, situational awareness, what is actually going on, but then also zooming internally. What are my patterns?

How am I showing up? Where am I being triggered? What's going on? Where am I reactive?

So it's, you know, that that observe has two aspects. And then what reminded me about this and why I wanted to tell you about this is when I'm in deep complexity, I have to remind myself to practice lightness. That's the L of cool. And that is, can I be playful?

Can I still notice everything that's going right? Can I laugh? Can I every morning start the morning with a dance and just remember that not everything, because complexity can start to feel really heavy. And when we succumb to that heaviness, we lose the playfulness and the imaginative capacities and the intuitive capacities that we need.

So I remind myself to be cool. I think that's um probably the shortest answer. Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

You know, it's as it as you're speaking, it's reminding me in my mindfulness training. One of the key reasons the mind suffers in the actual, if you look at the literature and the way it's trained and the four foundations of mindfulness, is because it's insisting on stability where there is none. It's craving attachment. It wants security and stability.

And then it deludes itself that it has it by creating fixed ideas. Because interestingly enough, the in mindfulness training, the world, there is no such thing as anything fixed. Everything's shifting and moving. That's the nature of reality.

So the mind doesn't like that. So then the mind hangs on to belief and views, because those beliefs and views can stay stable, which then gives the illusion of security. And then when that belief or that view is threatened, the person feels threatened, even though it's a view that has no substance, it's just a view. And at the very, very center of it all is kind of almost, even though this was taught two and a half thousand years ago, then there was no quantum physics, but it was this coming to ease and peace with the fact that nothing's stable.

And then if that happens, then the mind becomes free because then the mind's no longer holding on and insisting on a world of stability. And that's the the realm of beginner's mind. It's the realm of learning. But what's so interesting about even listening to you is it reminds me of another adult development research.

I had my podcast, Alice and Nagnostarkis, is that to be our best requires working with discomfort and requires not knee-jerking into the response that makes us comfortable. And you said it when you said to the courage to seek diverse views. And you'd think, like, why does that take courage? Because one of those or many of those diverse views may in fact prove your views are inaccurate and your views may have been providing familiar sense of worth and your expertise.

And suddenly your sense of expertise and worth are being challenged because your views, and in fact, there was an amazing moment with a client yesterday where she got a feedback on her assessment that she might be an aggressive leader. And she said, She said, I like I don't this, I don't know this about myself. And I asked, What's it like not knowing that you might be angry and you're not even aware of it? And she said, terrifying.

I said, Yeah, of course. Like you're doing behaviors that you're not even aware. Imagine that. Like, it's like you're out of control.

And it seems like there's this constant theme in navigating complexity. It a lot of it's about self-management. It's about can I stay curious and open, even though it's freaking killing me and it's uncomfortable? Can I stay cool?

Because every part of me wants to go to the old view or the thing that's worked or the thing that makes me feel good, or the it takes quite some self-management, isn't it, to not knee-jerk, to not panic, to not run, to not I mean, slowing down in the midst when it in the whole system telling you speed up. That takes a lot of And I I think yes. And I think this is the so there are a couple of things. We've become addicted to comfort.

Yeah. You know, I I was listening to a podcast by Esther Perel a few months ago. And she was talking about we've created almost like a form of assisted living with all of our apps. Because if you think about it, you know, I don't I don't necessarily choose the music I want to listen to.

The algorithm tells me what to listen to next. The algorithm tells me what book to read next, what to watch on Netflix next. So if I don't like it, it wasn't my fault. It was the algorithm, you know.

So it's almost like I no longer have the discomfort of making bad decisions. There's that aspect to it. I think there's so there's a big part that is self-management, but then there's also the the recognition that the self is never singular, embedded in systems, been socialized to think in certain ways and hold certain beliefs. You know, so there's there's this interplay between the individual and the collective.

And I think especially from a leadership position, it's really important to remember that because sometimes what leaders do is they love to tell people, like for example, you have to have a growth mindset, you need to experiment and fail and learn. But then the system, everything in that system is set up to say, mm-mm, we don't tolerate failure here. So there's a, and this is why, you know, whenever we tell people you need to change your mindset, you know, it's a very dangerous thing to say if you're not also working on the system.

But where I do definitely agree with you is one thing is we need to see and accept reality as it is. And your description of nothing being stable, everything always being in flux is a perfect, almost like a perfect explanation of complexity. That's why I always say to people, complexity is life. You can almost just use the two words interchangeably.

But one of the problems is whenever people mostly when they encounter that word complexity, it's in the context of a problem. I have a complex problem, or I have a, what do they call it, a wicked problem. I really dislike that term because it immediately puts us in a in resistance to complexity. Right.

If you understand that complexity is life, sometimes the pattern can show up as a problematic one. But everything that makes life worth living is also complex. The beauty in our the ecosystems around us, our families, falling in love is complex. So we need to we need to divorce the word complex and the word problem.

I think that's one place to start. And then really cultivate this ability or the even just the willingness to accept the world as it is, to accept that things are always changing, but then also to understand that change is also what keeps you alive. Change is what brings vitality to our organizations. Nonlinearity and surprise is what makes that's where opportunity comes from, not only problems.

So I think there's this we need to to reauthor this narrative that tells us that the world is supposed to be certain, supposed to be stable, and I am supposed to be in control. Because I think that's where the key, if we can shift that and we can say, this is more like surfing a wave. Yes, you can read the environment and you can build a strong inner core and you can and you can actually you can surf, but you're not in control. But that's where the fun, you know, I think it's like you're saying to yourself, I don't know all the answers.

A lot of my work, as I say to clients, that every client I work with has uh imposter syndrome. They all do. It's like, of course you have imposter syndrome because you're telling yourself you should know when you don't know. And you're trying to present as if you know when you don't know.

Of course that's an imposter. And that comes right down to the baseline of the ego. So it's almost like you're trying to, if you're listening, anyone listening to this, you're trying to let yourself know that it's okay that you don't know. It's actually truth that no one knows.

Life's incredibly complex. And to learn as you go and embrace learning as you're going is actually means you're on track. It kind of means you're you're in the right place. You you shouldn't have to you shouldn't know.

You can't know everything. It's impossible. And so just take a relaxed. I think the Buddha said it when he said we're so desperately trying to insist reality is stable that we're not working on how to be at ease in the instability.

We're working on the wrong thing. To be curious and open in the stability. We l we lose all our curiosity and openness because we're chasing stability. And we're we're losing the very thing we're looking for, and that is ease.

Because when you can relax into what is, you can have ease. But when you try and control something that can't be controlled and know something that can't be known. And you know, and the irony is when you look back on your life, like I couldn't have predicted 20 years ago that I would be sitting here talking to you, doing the work I'm doing. We've always known as we go, but we tell ourselves the story that we had a plan and everything worked according to plan.

But you know, it it doesn't, it doesn't work like that. And I think how boring would life be if it did. So I think that's the other thing. If we could know everything, I one of my clients, I I'll never forget, you know, I introduced complexity to them, and a few years later she said to me, When I really understood complexity, it was like this enormous weight lifted off of my shoulders because I understood finally that it's not that I don't know, it is that nobody can know.

Yeah. And so we're all kind of finding our way together. And I I think there is ease in that. There's also a simplicity within the complexity.

It's almost like when you stop trying to tame it and you stop trying to control it and you surrender to I'm going to sense and respond. I'm going to see what wants to emerge, what is already going on, where can I add energy to change that's already happening? There's a simplicity and an ease to leading and managing like that. When you shift out of this wanting to control everything.

But yeah, when somebody that's in it, it sounds very naive and almost impossible. I uh it's beautiful. So if I to try and I always love to try and because of my my own history around growth and development, it's always trying, what can I practice? How can I consciously move to that which is good uh versus just reflexing in my normal ways?

What I'm I'm gonna bring us to a summary now, because I could I literally I could ask you another 20 questions. Like I can feel them all, and like, no, this podcast will just go on forever. Then maybe we'll have to do a part two. It's it's the fact I can still hold people accountable in the uncertainty because people make commitments, you can hold people accountable for commitments, I can still have difficult conversations, particularly, particularly because they can generate learning.

But when I really look at it, it's it's it's the position of taking a position that we don't know, I don't know. Um we're still taking educated bets, and we're gonna learn from our educated bets, but we can take away the idea that someone out there knows or should know or I know, and if I'm the leader, I should know. And we can move ahead with a curious learning mindset. But the paradox is we need to watch for when we've moved into panic and we're now running and grabbing at things because that's a really perverse form of it's it's of I'll come back to that.

So it's it's balanced, it's curious, it's aware, it's in touch with reality. It's also focused, interesting enough, it's not scattered. And I think that the phrase I wanted to use is the near enemy and the far enemy is one of the principles from Tibetan Buddhism that I came across once, where every principle of virtue is a near enemy and a far enemy. And the far enemy is the easily identified opposite.

So, what's the opposite of navigating complexity? It's doing it like we've always done it. That's that's oh my god, that's the opposite of learning. What's the near enemy?

It kind of looks like you're doing complexity, but you're not. It's you've you've been caught now by what are called the three poisons in mindfulness, like you've been caught by fear, or you've been caught by anger, or you've been caught by kind of delusion. And that looks like that that running around trying lots of stuff, not giving it time and then running to the next thing because it didn't work instantly. It looks like you're experimenting and learning, but you're not.

You're actually in a sort of flooded panic and you're not actually navigating complexity because it does need a degree of stillness and space and awareness to do it well. Even if you go back to Knevin, you know, it says in complexity you sense and respond. You don't blindly react. You know, and I think the first thing that goes is sensing.

We kind of go into we just want to do stuff, you know. We almost go into the chaotic mode of acting. Yeah. But even there, because in co in chaos, according to Knevan, it's act, sense, respond.

And I think we almost get into this like act respond, act respond. You know, we lose sensing. And that is where, you know, again, you know, it's taking the time, going to the balcony, and it's all of all of that. You know, it's like can we maintain our sensing ability?

Yeah. I think it is a key, a key aspect. Yeah. Which added this at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it turns out that's mindfulness.

We uh we often use the term makes, you know, these terms in English, make sense, sensitive in a good way. Um sensible, don't speak nonsense, don't be insensitive. Is that when we are sensing, we are connected with presence and awareness and we're actually intelligent and connected in the sensing. And sensing is a mindfulness practice.

In fact, if you define mindfulness, you'd say mindfulness is continuous sensing. It's not a brief moment of sensing. It's a that's the term mindfulness means to be consistent, to be in the present moment for for an extended period of time, not just a brief moment. That's when it becomes mindfulness.

So we're we're really almost saying, you know, we're saying being mindful, sense, and then respond from that wisdom and that curiosity. It's been such a joy listening to you and speaking to you. I guess I say Sonia, I could speak to you all day. Um and I'm really appreciating you meeting me in this kind of this kind of like pragmatic.

I really appreciate your flexibility and your meeting the complex, complex interviewer. I've had a lot of fun, so I hope we get to do it again, Michael. But I I think probably the main message for me is to just, you know, um just see the beauty in the complexity and that you're always already in it. I think I think if we can just stop problematizing the complexity, a lot of the difficulties will go away.

So that's probably my main message is befriend it. Yeah. It's what makes life worth living. Yeah, lovely.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Sonia. It's been a joy. Big pleasure. The Secret Life of Great Leaders is brought to you by Triple Goal, where good coaches become great and leaders grow their impact where it matters most.

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