What Makes Complex, Continuous Change Different?

The primary differences between complex, continuous change and single-change efforts is that triple-C demands prioritization, integration, not exceeding capacity, broader and deeper engagement, and agility.

Prioritization Managing priorities across efforts involves decisions about such things as leadership attention, financial resources, stakeholder involvement, process changes, and organizational design. Although we can optimize these things for a single change, multiple changes require tradeoffs and, ultimately, suboptimization of one change to support other changes.

Integration This involves integrating efforts to achieve the greatest impact in the shortest time at the least cost and with the least disruption. This requires seeing the big picture, understanding how efforts either reinforce or contradict one another, the impact that each effort will have on different parts of the system, and when and how everything will be accomplished. Attention to integration may mean that the timing or objectives of individual change efforts may actually shift in the context of other efforts under way. It also means making the effort to bring people together or otherwise keep them informed so that they understand how their work connects to that of others.

Not exceeding capacity This requires understanding the capacity of the organization to manage change, not overloading the system with more simultaneous change than it can handle, and finding ways to increase change capacity to allow more change to occur concurrently. This involves identifying change bottlenecks, like the same people being assigned to multiple change projects they cannot fully support. It also involves managing the organization’s emotional capacity; there is only so much change that people can tolerate before they become numb.

Complex, continuous change requires greater emotional investment than single-change efforts. People need to manage relationships up, down, and across that are shifting in their nature and intensity. They need to be executing plans and adjusting them at the same time. The energy required to manage all the change that is occurring while keeping customers satisfied may be greater than what is available. Organizations can reach the breaking point, as demonstrated by some of the cases covered earlier. As leaders of complex, continuous change, we need to have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake at the same time while constantly striving to improve the capacity of our organizations to change.

Broader and deeper engagement By its very nature, triple-C requires tapping into collective intelligence to manage the complexity of everything that is happening instead of leaving integration to an individual or team, who quickly become overloaded with information or problems to solve.

Agility Single changes sometimes require adjusting the approach based on what actually happens. Complex, continuous change always involves adjusting the approach and priorities on the fly as new information becomes available. While single changes can be “rolled out,” continuous change is always “a work in progress.” The nature of continuous change may cause the outcomes of earlier changes to be undone to allow progress against new objectives to be made.

Success at complex, continuous change requires more than initiating multiple single-change efforts and hoping that things will work out. We can’t simply trust that overlaps will be resolved, the right resources will be available when needed, parts of the organization will not become overloaded, individuals won’t burn out, changes will align rather than conflict, and so forth. This is a key point that must be emphasized because it is probably the single greatest threat to success in managing multiple changes simultaneously: Complex, continuous change requires focus and integration beyond that involved in undertaking single-change efforts. In the world of complex, continuous change, one plus one often equals zero unless the overall change is properly led.