JimCarroll

If the world gets faster, it gets more complex.

That was the central idea behind my keynote for the Quintiq World Tour 2017 in Philadelphia.

Quintiq built software designed to help organizations manage complex supply chains and workforces.

That made the audience particularly relevant to a trend I had been talking about for years:

Managing complexity was becoming a core strategic capability.

Organizations were dealing with more moving parts.

Supply chains were becoming more complicated.

Skills were becoming increasingly specialized.

Workforces were becoming harder to plan.

Business environments were moving faster.

And the amount of information available to support a decision was increasing at the same time that the time available to make the decision was shrinking.

That creates a paradox.

More information should make decisions easier.

But when the number of variables increases, the opposite can happen.

Organizations can become slower because the world around them becomes harder to manage.

My keynote focused on why that problem would become more important in the era of acceleration.

The winners would not necessarily be the organizations with the simplest environment.

They would be the organizations that became better at managing complexity.

Six themes captured the issue:

1. Faster Change. As business trends accelerate, organizations have less time to understand and respond to new conditions.

1. Complex Supply Chains. More interconnected operations create more dependencies, constraints and variables to coordinate.

1. Complex Workforces. Specialized skills and changing requirements make workforce planning increasingly difficult.

1. Skills Fragmentation. Organizations cannot realistically own every capability they need internally.

1. Complexity Partnerships. Companies increasingly need to exchange specialized expertise across networks of partners.

1. Decision Agility. Competitive advantage increasingly depends on making better decisions despite more variables and less time.

After the keynote, Quintiq interviewed me about a concept I had been developing for many years: complexity partners.

I had first written about the idea in *Surviving the Information Age*.

The basic premise was that the traditional model of owning all the skills required to operate a business would become increasingly difficult.

Expertise would become too fragmented.

Too specialized.

Too dynamic.

Instead, successful organizations would become better at accessing capability through networks.

They would provide specialized expertise to partners when they had it.

They would draw on the expertise of partners when they did not.

In other words, they would learn to manage the supply and demand of complexity itself.

That concept had moved from theory toward operating reality.

Quintiq’s own customers were evidence of the trend.

The strategic lesson was larger than supply-chain optimization or workforce scheduling.

It was about organizational design.

A faster world creates more uncertainty.

More uncertainty creates more variables.

More variables create more complexity.

And complexity punishes organizations that insist on managing the future with structures designed for a simpler past.

The answer is not to eliminate complexity.

Often you cannot.

The answer is to become better at operating within it.

The future belongs to organizations that can turn complexity from a burden into a capability.