Goals in complexity

One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled with, is that one really, truly doesn’t get to set goals. What happens instead, is that one can decide on a direction of travel and then look for the different ways one might move in that direction. It’s deceptively simple, and the hardest part is stopping oneself from measuring progress against goals! Today, as part of a post that aims to distinguish different kinds of systems thinking from anthro-complexity, Dave Snowden posts a useful summary of this approach, in answer to the question, does anthro-complexity have goals? (I’ve added links to anchor the references): Yes, but not in the Senge sense. In complexity, you look for the adjacent possible: the next move or moves that are available from where you are, and that requires mapping at some scale first, understanding the terrain as it…