Harness Social Complexity

Business Week: At 20 large U.S. banks, the cost of complying with U.S. laws and regulations grew 159 percent from 2001 to 2006, far faster than profit growth, an industry survey found. It costs the average big bank $83.5 million a year to keep up with Surbanes-Oxley, the Patriot Act, and other laws.

Given this reality, each of us needs to build greater "administration" time and effort into our plans. Society inherently grows more complex all the time. Our challenge is to harness that complexity and convert it to a competitive advantage.

Thinking in an Age of Complexity

How to Think: Managing Brain Resources in an Age of Complexity by Ed Boyden in Technology Review is brilliant article, excerpted herer

"When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules...

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read...

2. Learn how to learn, rapidly... Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there...

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day...

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things...

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly... Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on...

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols... Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world..

10. Keep it simple... If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler,
do it...

A Game Plan for Today

You need a game plan for your day, and for your week. Otherwise you'll allocate your time according to whatever information happens to land on your desk or whatever communications begs for your attention. As such, other people's actions will determine your priorities. And you will find yourself making the fatal mistake of dealing primarily with problems rather than opportunities.

Three Simple Blogs

If you have yet to visit my other two blogs, start Autumn off right by clicking below:

* for the time-pressured: www.BreathingSpaceBlog.com
* for meeting planners: www.OpeningKeynote.com