Happiness at work: a complex ecosystem

When we talk about Happiness at Work we talk about a positive mindset that enables people to maximize their performance, and achieve their potential. Throughout our research journey and our consulting practice we have gathered evidence that Happiness at Work has an impact on business results. We have also learned that happiness is a multi-dimensional reality that can be measured and managed. Yet we have observed another important thing: when trying to influence their people’s mindset at work, many executives and HR professionals overlook that Happiness at Work is a complex system that needs to be handled as such.

Many executives tend to manage Happiness at Work as if they were in front of a system made of linear cause-effect relationships that can be unveiled if that system is carefully dissected, observed and analyzed. As if they were in what Dave Snowden calls the “domain of methodology”, where cause-effect relationships can be identified through the study of properties which appear to be associated with qualities. One where the typical decision sequence consists of sensing incoming data, analyzing it, and then responding with expert advice or interpretation.

However, although Happiness at Work is a system (i.e. “a set of interacting or interdependent component parts forming an intricate whole, delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, and surrounded and influenced by its environment”), it belongs to a different domain: the “domain of complexity”. And it needs to be managed differently.

We can regard Happiness at Work as an “eco-system” that displays many of the properties that according to Kastens (2009), Randall (2011), Ladyman (2013) and other authors characterize complex systems. For instance:

• Numerosity.
• Happiness at Work is made of a very large number of interdependent components (variables).
• Spontaneous order. Happiness at Work arises from a large number of uncoordinated interactions between those variables.
• Emergence. Happiness at Work emerges out of those interactions. Yet while the results may be sufficiently determined by the activity of its elements, there are some behaviors of the system as a whole that can only be studied at a higher level.
• Adaptiveness. Happiness at Work adapts to changes in the environment.
• Non linearity. Happiness at Work can move from a high degree of stability to very unstable behavior. The effects are not always directly proportional to their causes: a small perturbation may cause a large effect, and a big impact can have no effect at all.
• Feedback loops. Thus, a change in a variable may result in either an amplification or a dampening of that change.
• Cascade failures. Due to the interactions between variables, a failure in one or more elements can lead to cascading failures that may have catastrophic consequences on Happiness at Work.
• Limited predictability. Since small changes in initial conditions can lead to very different dynamics over time, the evolution of Happiness at Work (in a person or in an organization) cannot be predicted well.
• Hysteresis. Like any complex system Happiness at Work is a dynamic system that changes over time and its history may have an influence on its present state.

So Happiness at Work is not like a complicated machine, but more like a rainforest: a living being made of other living beings. And this is something many business leaders seem to ignore when they try to influence their people through simplistic actions.

As Dave Snowden explained in 2007 in his celebrated article “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” complex realities need to be managed differently:

“Of primary concern is the temptation to fall back into traditional command-and-control management styles — to demand fail-safe business plans with defined outcomes. Leaders who don’t recognize that a complex domain requires a more experimental mode of management may become impatient when they don’t seem to be achieving the results they were aiming for. They may also find it difficult to tolerate failure, which is an essential aspect of experimental understanding. If they try to overcontrol the organization, they will preempt the opportunity for informative patterns to emerge. Leaders who try to impose order in a complex context will fail, but those who set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, and determine which ones are desirable will succeed.”

And that applies 100% to Happiness at Work.

However, we need to remember that most managers have been taught to formulate strategies, set targets, launch campaigns, transmit certainty, and fix problems by applying “best practices”. But they don’t have a clue what to do in a complex scenario or where things are unpredictable and the causes of the effects they perceive around them can only be identified in retrospect.

In this new domain the solutions that worked in the predictable, linear, Cartesian world they come from don’t work anymore. Here, instead of sensing reality, analyzing it, and then responding to the results, the typical decision sequence is different. It’s a matter of probing then making sense of the results of those experiments, and finally responding with actions of not always certain results.

And to do that business leaders need to be brave. They need to dare to try out new solutions, assume failure is a valuable source of learning, and make a deliberate effort to question and break with old paradigms. Their perceptions of reality, and also their intuition, may be distorted by cognitive biases that are consequence of a past that has gone.

Santi Garcia

Originally posted on Medium.com