It’s not about the people involved; a lesson from complexity science
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I went through this really idealistic phase a couple decades ago: I thought that most problems could be solved with more collaboration, more communication. Unfortunately I found out that more isn’t more, you can actually have too much.
An example of this that you may have experienced is when you’re part of a big project or change effort and you see more and more people get thrown into the mix week after week in the name of “alignment” or “collaboration”. And then in the end, nothing actually happens. Nothing changes.
Turns out there’s a scientific backing for this phenomenon, and an actual sweet spot for the right amount of connection. You can have too little and you can have too much, but that spot in the middle is called “the edge of chaos” and–despite its name–it’s actually kind of the perfect spot to be to facilitate change.
Today I’m pulling from research on organizational complexity, with reference to a specific 2001 paper that did a literature review and a modeling exercise to evaluate that sweet spot, the edge of chaos.
Back in the 1980s, biologist Stuart Kauffman created a really interesting mathematical model called the NK model. One of the many things that’s come out of this model in the decades since is the recognition that as the number of elements in a system goes up, the interconnection between those elements should also go up… but at a much lower rate.
To put this in plain language: you do not want to scale collaborators at the same rate that you scale connections between everyone; the connections should stay notably lower than the number of people involved.
Why? Because when there are too many people communicating with each other, too many people collaborating in the name of change, nothing changes. In complexity terms, it’s because too much interconnectedness creates instability which then makes it difficult for change to propagate and remain. In other words, it creates a state of chaos where things you intend to happen actually can’t really happen. That sweet spot, the edge of chaos, is made possible when the collaboration is structured such that the amount of interconnectedness is less than the amount of people involved. Now the actual structure of the connections between people (let’s say hub-and-spoke vs chain) can also be important, but that’s a topic for another time.
So – if you want collaboration that drives change, of course consider who and how many people are involved, but it may be even more important to consider how much interconnectedness between you all is the right amount. Thanks for listening.
Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009633728444 (pdf is available via Google Scholar)