Complex Systems
You're staring at a problem, and it feels overwhelming.
Maybe it's an organizational crisis or a personnel issue. Maybe it's a team conflict so tangled that you can't see where it starts or where it ends. The weight of it sits on your shoulders in a way that keeps you awake at night. It's not because you lack intelligence or commitment, but because everything feels connected to everything else, and you can't see a way forward.
It's the feeling that a decision has become too big. In this piece, you'll learn a simple way to break those overwhelming problems into one component and one lever at a time.
My great-grandmother lived an amazing life. I remember her telling me stories of coming to Indiana as a little girl in a covered wagon. She liked to contrast that with her experience of flying on an airliner. A family story about my great-grandmother has been very useful to many of my executive coaching clients.
It is a story about how she faced overwhelming complex feelings.
Early in her marriage to my great-grandfather, he presented her with a gold pocket watch. This was a precious gift at a time when they did not have much. It was very important to her. Tragically my great-grandfather died at a young age.
My great-grandmother was left suddenly with a crushing reality. It wasn't just the grief; it was the sheer scale of the responsibilities left behind. She had a water-powered grist mill to manage. She had a farm. And suddenly, she had bills to manage that had never been her responsibility.
She was overwhelmed with the financial weight of it all. Like many women of her era, she had relied on her husband to navigate the complexities of managing their resources. When he was gone, the gaps became apparent. The "project" of surviving and keeping the family afloat shifted to her.
One day, facing a twelve-dollar debt she asked my grandfather to drive her into town. She asked to be dropped by the pawn shop on Main Street. My grandfather waited in his old Ford truck and watched.
When she emerged and disappeared around the corner to pay their bills, he was curious as to what she'd done and entered the pawn shop. She had pawned the gold watch my great-grandfather had given her—a symbol of their partnership—for exactly twelve dollars. The precise amount she needed to pay the bills.
She didn't have the tools to manage the whole complex system of the estate yet. She only had one lever she could pull to survive the moment.
My grandfather, in a moment of grace, bought it back for the same price, preserving the legacy that has now been passed down five generations to my daughter. But the lesson remains.
The Watchmaker's Wisdom — Transitioning from Complex to Complicated
Imagine that the gold watch eventually stopped working and I took it to an experienced watchmaker. I would bring it to the watchmaker because it was way too complex for me to fix. Yet he invited me to stand close and look over his shoulder as he opened the case back.
What confronts you inside a watch is the same thing that confronted my great-grandmother: overwhelm.
Springs. Levers. Gears. Wheels. An architecture so intricate, so interdependent, that it seems impossible. The tiny components appear to dance in chaotic patterns. How could anyone possibly understand this? How could anyone fix it?
But then the watchmaker begins to teach.
"This gear," he pointed with a jeweler's precision, "controls the minute hand." His finger moves to another component. "This one manages the hour hand." He continues, methodically, patiently, explaining how each spring, each lever, each gear served a specific function.
- What seemed chaotic becomes intelligible.
- The overwhelming becomes comprehensible.
- The complex transformed into the complicated.
What the watchmaker does in that moment is exactly what overwhelmed leaders need to learn to do. Modern leadership often fails because we treat these two things as synonyms. They aren't.
- Complicated systems (like a watch or an engine) have many parts, but they follow rules. If you have the expertise, you can solve them.
- Complex systems (like your team, your organization, or my great-grandmother's sudden financial crisis) have parts that interact and change. You can't just "fix" them; you have to navigate them.
When a project gets "too big," it's usually because it has shifted from complicated to complex. You can't solve it all at once. You need a framework to break it down.
The Framework: Two Tools to Navigate Chaos
Navigating the overwhelming requires two connected movements. Most leaders freeze because they try to do both at once.
The Watchmaker's Lens: Deconstruct the Component
This is the first step: refusing to look at the "whole" mess. When the watchmaker looks at a broken mechanism, he doesn't try to fix "the watch." He looks at the escapement. He looks at the mainspring.
In leadership, this means stopping the narrative that "everything is broken."
Instead of saying "Our culture is toxic," you use the Watchmaker's Lens to zoom in: "The 9 AM meeting has a pattern where junior staff are interrupted."
Instead of saying "We're running out of money," (the panic my grandmother felt), you zoom in: "We have three specific vendor invoices due on Friday."
You shift from the abstract nightmare to the concrete component. You make the implicit explicit.
The Adaptive Lever: One Small Intervention
Here is where most leaders get stuck: they think they need a comprehensive strategy to fix the component. They want a 5-year plan.
But in complex systems, you don't need a master plan. You need a lever.
My great-grandmother needed twelve dollars. That was her lever. It didn't solve the farm's long-term profitability, but it solved the immediate pressure that was blocking her.
The Adaptive Lever asks: What is the smallest action I can take right now that will create a positive shift in this one component?
It's not about fixing the whole machine. It's about getting one gear moving again. When one gear moves, it affects the next. The system begins to unstuck itself.
I often ask clients, "What is the next one wisest step?" or "What is one thing you will do that I can ask you about next time we talk?"
What Happens When You Find the Lever
My great-grandmother didn't have the language of complex systems or leadership theory. She just had the weight of the world on her shoulders. But she instinctively found the lever: twelve dollars.
That story was never told in our family to embarrass my great-grandmother's legacy. She sacrificed something very important to survive. My family followed her lead and worked alongside her as a team. My grandfather operated the mill for several years and eventually bought the farm from her. The family remained close, supportive and proud of how they helped each other find a way to make life work.
When you stop trying to solve the "whole" and start finding your levers, the paralysis breaks. You move from being a victim of chaos to being a navigator of it.
Your team feels this shift. They stop sensing your panic and start sensing your focus. When a leader says, "We can't fix everything today, but we are going to fix this specific thing," it lowers the collective anxiety. It builds momentum.
In our family the watch is a symbol not just of family loyalty, but of the principle they modeled: When everything feels too big, find the component that matters most. Understand it. Act on it. Then move to the next.
That's the leadership tool that changes everything.