This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
Complex is not the same as complicated
On the way back from France, the lights on our dashboard started to come on. One by one. We made it home, but we needed someone who knew about these things. The mechanic did what a good mechanic does: he searched. Engine, parts, parts of parts, until he found a small filter. Filter replaced, all lights off.
I tell that story in a workshop on strategic thinking, because it is so satisfying. There is one cause, you find it, you solve it. That is how we are trained to think. And that is exactly why things go wrong as soon as we unleash that way of thinking on something that is not a car.
Complicated or complex
In Dutch we lump two things together under the word 'ingewikkeld'. A car is complicated. It has many parts and you need an expert, but everything is in a fixed structure. Cause and effect run in a straight line. Whoever searches long enough will find the broken part.
A team is complex. An organisation, a family, a market too. There, many things influence each other at the same time, and not in a straight line. Afterwards you can often explain nicely why something happened, like the weatherman who knows exactly which front caused it after a week of rain. Predicting it beforehand is much less successful.
The classic example from IT: the coffee has run out, so we do a root cause analysis. Soon you are no longer looking at the machine but at people. Who should have refilled it, why did nobody do it, who feels responsible for that. I always think of a drawing of a duck that is drawn as a machine, with gears and levers. It looks funny, and it is not right. A duck is not a little machine. It is alive.
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