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Conversations about the media economy, and how to think clearly when things get messy.
This is Puzzle, Problem, Mess, conversations about the media economy and how to think clearly when things get messy. One of the through lines of these puzzle problem mess conversations is that the media sector is facing a period of extraordinary complexity and that navigating this complexity is as much about company culture and organizational adaptiveness as it is about strategic and competitive smarts. Knowing what needs to change is one thing, but having the organizational capacity to actually adapt seems to be the critical thing as we covered with Chet Richards in episode six. So if you're working and leading in media today, you're no doubt stepping through the mist of complexity that's descended upon you, whether that's in your workplace, day to day, or in your thinking about your career over the longer term. And if you've been extra studious and you've tried to dip your toe into some of the materials around complexity and systems thinking, you might have quickly found that you're lost in a dense forest of academic abstraction and highly technical language, and you can't easily find your way to anything that you can put to use the next day at work, which is why I'm delighted to have been able to speak with David Olney on this episode because David is what I found to be a rare breed, a complexity specialist who is able to speak about the topic in a way that makes it tangible and useful for your ordinary worker like me.
Dan Fahy:David is an Australian. He's based in Adelaide. His career has spanned university teaching, security analysis, professional training, and strategic communication. For nearly twenty years, he lectured at the University of Adelaide teaching subjects including applied thinking, complex problem solving, international security, and the politics of leadership. He's also trained people across defense, government, and private organizations, including the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Department of Defense.
Dan Fahy:In the conversation that follows, David explains with great clarity the difference between complicated and complex challenges and the barriers that make adaptation so difficult for your company and you. We explore why solving specific problems can sometimes make the wider situation worse, how organizations can learn to spot emerging threats before they get out of hand, and why the capacity to lead change from the middle of an organization, not just from the top ranks, may be one of the most important capabilities a media company can develop. Here's David Olney. David, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Dan Fahy:Perhaps as a preface to the conversation, could you set out how you think we should best understand the differences between complicated problems and complex problems?
David Olney:This is one of these thorny things that if you get the right bunch of complex problem solving people together, they'll have a conference on, and they'll take a week, Which normally means I want to scream find the bar and start concluding what can I mix with each other thing to you know reduce the pain of this conference? So my solution to this is actually very simple. Always start from the premise that what you're dealing with is complex until you can prove otherwise. And that being, if you are dealing with anything related to humans or time, there are going to be multiple factors that over time influence each other differently. If you're dealing with people over time, they're going to behave differently and thus change the interactions.
David Olney:So complexity is always got baked into a disability that it will change as you're interacting with it. And the components will change simply by interacting with each other. In comparison, something that is merely complicated has a lot of parts, but the parts interact with each other in a reliable way. And they do that consistently because physics and chemistry don't change unless you radically alter some external factor on that system. And if you do alter some factor, so for example, you take a car from being in a desert and instead put it on a frozen lake.
David Olney:Well, the car itself is complicated. But the minute we put it in the desert or on the frozen lake, we've entered the world of the complex. And
Dan Fahy:thinking about people in organizations today, and it's a it's a generalization deliberately. So do people tend to interact with complicated problems or a mix of complex and complicated, and they just haven't seen the complexity? Or are we living in a world, a corporate world where we're dealing in the main with complicated problems?
David Olney:I think people desperately want things to be complicated so that they can feel if they put the work in now, they will get a result that will last. And two, if it's complicated, maybe their stress levels won't go up and they won't feel like they're faking it till they make it. So I really think we pretend at complicated predominantly for psychological human reasons. Not because we can't assess it properly, but because in the mind humans choose not to assess things properly.
Dan Fahy:Now you've had many years teaching complex problem solving at universities and organizations, and so when does an organization approach or cross the threshold from an environment that is mostly complicated to an environment that is mostly complex? Are there telltale signs when you know you're you're in a very, very complex environment organizationally?
David Olney:I think the most common way people work it out is a very uncomfortable way, and that is their first catastrophic failure or very, very big near miss. At that point, they realized they genuinely didn't see it coming. They haven't learned to look for anomalies. They haven't learned to understand the idea of a cascade. And once they realize how near they were to disaster or that the disaster could have been even worse, is the minute where they realize at an institutional and a group level, they must start listening to people more who are, you know directly at the coalface and they must start assessing the relationships between things better.
David Olney:Until then, there is a terrible habit for organizations to just go la la la la la la and pretend it's complicated. And really historically the only exceptions to that are aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and emergency departments in hospitals, where thinking it's complicated kills people too fast. And they had to grow out of it institutionally much earlier than other organizations and teams.
Dan Fahy:The sector this podcast is situated in is the wider media and entertainment sectors. And in the main, a lot of media institutions have benefited from almost a cultural institution type protection in market. There's been regulated protection for broadcasters. These sorts of environments don't present shocking turn of events too often at a at a corporate level. It's rare that you would be materially caught off guard as as an incumbent or traditional media institution.
Dan Fahy:How have you seen or how do you counsel organizations that may not have the benefit of waiting for a shock to come along?
David Olney:I think there's two versions of this going on in the media world. So for example, I've done work with radio stations where they understood streaming from personal experience, but trying to elaborate from personal experience to what streaming would do to the radio station. They were worried, but also it was very hard to give up the thing they loved and the thing they were good at and work out how to behave differently. So the real limiter on when you know people start doing something is often if you love what you're doing you don't really want to change it and if you're very good at what you're doing you don't really want to change it. But when you start having a personal experience that challenges your professional experience, you tend to go, oh, maybe we should take action.
David Olney:And I think at the moment AI is the catastrophe on the horizon both for creatives and for the structural side of media organizations. That you know creatives are worried and the people who run the big business and just the administrative side of media companies are both worried for different reasons. And again, it's a great fear of losing what they have rather than thinking how they can leverage what they have and technology to do better. So I think AI is causing the fastest response I've ever seen And streaming was a slower response, but everyone realized from personal experience that they had to do something at an organizational level because their own behavior was changing, which meant, you know, their consumers behavior was also changing.
Dan Fahy:So we've been talking here at the intersection of complicated and complex, and it was Russell Akoff who in the seventies coined the term puzzle problems, messes in the context of complex problem solving. And one of Russell Akoff's themes was not that complexity, in his terms, messes, were inherently unapproachable and unnavigable, but the breaking a mess down into parts and trying to solve the parts and expecting the larger complexity to resolve as you did so was a bit of a trap. And he would suggest... Akhov would suggest that independently solving constituent problems can intensify a mess, can intensify the complexity because the problems interact. Could you expand on this theme some more?
David Olney:Absolutely. Akoff is amazing but also impenetrable because he's an early systems thinker and with in the main latched onto just a small piece, which is the puzzle problem mess. But we got to remember as a systems thinker, he was also thinking in terms of before you start tinkering with this environment or situation, this environment or situation is doing its own thing. So if it's something like the biosphere, it you know, bumbled along for a very long time happily. Along came humans started burning fossil fuels.
David Olney:We start changing the biosphere. All of a sudden we've altered something that wasn't necessarily stable, but you could predict what was going to happen because it had done similar things for an extended period of time. Suddenly we do one thing and we make it very different. So for ACOF, it's always looking further out to see the entire system and then going, now you want to play with this particular thing over here. This problem within the mess.
David Olney:Well the many you do that, you're going to destabilize the rest of the mess. And even if you think you've got a victory by making that problem run the way you want it to run, you've just introduced feedback into the entire system. And a lot of people I don't think really want to acknowledge that everything you do causes a ripple on the surface of the pond. Everything you do causes a flow on beyond the thing you can immediately see to the thing that that would have affected if you weren't there. And even though that may seem overwhelming to a lot of people, if you just accept that you're always working with incomplete knowledge and you are always causing ripples in whatever system or situation you're interacting with.
David Olney:It just teaches you to go carefully but to also recognize that you have no choice but to act. Because if you don't act, the system will act on you, and that may be something that you would have a real problem with. Yeah. That... That's interesting.
David Olney:So would you mind talking a little bit more to what Akoff's suggestion was for how to act
Dan Fahy:in a messy environment. You've talked to a little bit there around trying things, watching, trying again, watching, understanding how the system is is reacting to the fixes you're you're putting into it. But can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think this is really a really interesting area.
David Olney:It is very interesting. And again, you recently had an episode on the OODA loop. And I think this is a really good time to bring the OODA loop in, you know, the whole thing of observe, orient, decide, act, and then crank, repeat, crank, repeat, crank, repeat. But people tend to misunderstand orient in the OODA loop as you just work out what you want to do. No.
David Olney:You work out which thing is easiest to influence. Which thing is most significant to influence. Which thing if you tinkered with it would explode in your face and cause some sort of system failure that would then make your life even harder. So orient is what can you do that's safe? What can you do that's dangerous?
David Olney:What can you do that gets you closer to your preferred endpoint? What can you do to totally and utterly disrupt the system which is probably going to be very very dangerous? And Akhov you know, this is the stuff he really wrote about in-depth that makes most people's eyes glaze over. Is all the different ways to try and make sense of the mess in which we live. And the mess really is just the normal world.
David Olney:It's kind of sad that he called it Puzzle Problem Mess. He really would have I think been better off calling it Puzzle Problem World. Because within the thing he called a mess, you've got problem on top of problem on top of problem. And all the problem really means is there's things with multiple variables that interact with each other and can go in different directions depending on the interactions. And then when you put all these problems together in a confined space of the world, every time you alter a variable within one problem, that problem then bumps into the problem beside it.
David Olney:And until you start investigating carefully, you don't even know yet if a variable within one problem is a variable inside another problem. So for example, know the classic thing, well I think it's a classic way to explain this to people is you take an environment like Yellowstone National Park in The US where they got rid of all the beavers and the wolves. And then they had all these problems with water flow, problems with how the forest grew, problems with deer getting out of control. Because by getting rid of a predator and an animal you can make nice hats out of, you totally and utterly destabilize the environment. You put an alpha predator back in and you put beavers back in and suddenly instead of rushing waterways that erode banks and do damage, you have big ponds slow moving water.
David Olney:You get blades, you get young trees growing. Now those young trees would have normally been destroyed by the deer. You put the wolf back in, and suddenly the wolf's eating the deer. The glades are surviving. The trees are growing back.
David Olney:The trees are stabilizing the banks around the edge of the ponds, which means even when you know you get flooding and it goes over the beaver dams, you don't wash away the banks all the new young trees and you still have a healthy environment. So there's a case of understanding the beaver was one problem. Understanding the wolf was a different problem. They existed within the mess that was Yellowstone National Park. If you put one back in only, you could have solved the problem of the beaver or the problem of the wolf.
David Olney:But you never would have solved the world that is the national park which we strangely call a mess. So really if you're going to start looking at one species or one thing and go well this thing here affects waterways. That's interesting. What do waterways affect? They affect trees.
David Olney:What else affects trees? Deer. What affects deer? Wolves. So unless you're going to sit and take the time to understand that flow on effect and in some ways that can feel immensely overwhelming to people.
David Olney:So I think we'll borrow a thing here from the Toyota corporation. You know we'll borrow five whys from Toyota. If there's a problem or something you want to understand. Know why did the guys put the engine in wrong in this model car? Because they're idiots.
David Olney:Well why are the guys idiots? Well they're actually idiots because they didn't get the instructions for putting the new engine mounts in. Why didn't they get the instructions? Well because the instructions were done by the team that designed that component and we don't have clear relationships between them and the people installing things. Why don't we?
David Olney:Because they're in two different plants. So suddenly you're at a completely different answer just by asking why five times. And in the main in the world, the five whys is the best way to get beyond your assumption that you're dealing with a puzzle that only has one solution. Then get to a problem that has variables and then start situating your problem inside the mess which is really just the world. And it's saying the fifth why a reasonable answer.
David Olney:If you take action on the fifth why, you're going to do something less dangerous, more informed, more impactful and more understood than if you just focus on the thing you're initially interested in. So really it's easier to borrow from Toyota to live in Akoff's world than it is to understand Akoff in his own terms.
Dan Fahy:Got you. And I would love us to keep talking about your thoughts on useful tools and frameworks like the five whys. But before we do that, can I take you back to Yellowstone National Park? And and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think ACOF also suggested that it is helpful to put some artificial boundaries around messes. Like, you can't hope to properly describe the full complexity of a mess because it it probably has no boundaries, but it was quite reasonable and helpful, in fact, necessary to put an artificial boundary around a certain type of mess to make it manageable.
David Olney:Is that right? Is that what he recommended? Essentially, that's always where systems theory starts to kinda hit attention. And that is how much can we deal with inside the box? How much is outside the box that we can't deal with?
David Olney:And here, I will actually borrow something from political science because I think it's far clearer than anything ACOF wrote. So Samuel p Huntington famously wrote an article called the clash of civilizations, which became so important in political science that it became a book called the clash of civilizations. And a lot of people have attacked Huntington for saying that the world is gonna divide against cultural fault lines. That's where the wars will be, and we'll kill each other over culture. That's not what Huntington said.
David Olney:What Huntington said is at the end of the cold war, the world would no longer be divided by all it but divided by ideology. That instead it was most likely to be divided by culture because that was the next really important thing to people. And as people with things in common stick together, the greatest risk was people with things in common stick together in a world where there aren't enough resources. So they fight with another group who stick together because they have things in common. But he makes the point in the introduction to the book.
David Olney:This is a necessary oversimplification of the world we live in, because we cannot deal with it as it really is. So accept that your necessary simplification is a problem, but that you can't deal with, you know, the world or the problem without simplifying.
Dan Fahy:Yeah. I think that's really helpful when you take this back into an organizational setting. Your analysis needs to move forward, it needs some sort of bound around it even if it's an artificial construction. So leaving ACOF to the side or behind, what tools and frameworks do you personally find the most helpful for setting individuals or teams up to navigate complexity?
David Olney:I think one of the first things that's massively important is to get a team to decide amongst themselves. Are we dealing with something we have to do perfectly or do we just need to get it done? So I always like to get a team to understand Herbert Simon first. The idea are we maximizing or are we satisfying? Are we doing the best job we can possibly do, or are we gonna define that all we need to do is get the job done on a basic level?
David Olney:And just getting a group to agree are we maximizing or we satisfying is a massive first step. Because the vast majority of things maximizing is unnecessary. But you need to decide where the quality bar is somewhere between maximizing and satisfying. And the sooner you get an agreed quality bar, everyone doesn't have to love it. But they have to know that is the agreed level to which we are going to address this situation.
David Olney:After that the next critical thing, I think is people really need to understand is all the work on high reliability organizations from sort of people like Wickes and Sutcliffe. Where they did all the work on aircraft carriers, nuclear power stations and emergency departments. And they said big difference with these organizations is they never oversimplify. In ACOF's term, they never believe they're dealing with a puzzle or a problem. They always believe they're dealing with a mess and they're defining a problem within the mess that is currently causing them real problems and they define as many variables as possible but they also accept that that isn't an excuse not to act.
David Olney:You always must act and in terms of a strategy for action, the best one I've found comes from the US Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program. Where in military parlance, something that is left of bang means you're before the IED goes off. Right of bane is it's already gone off and you're now cleaning up the mess of injured or dead people. You always wanna be left of bane. And the Marine Corps made a very conscious decision in 2007 that they were gonna be left a bang as often as possible.
David Olney:And what they realized in almost every platoon patrolling in Afghanistan and Iraq was some kid from an awful part of The US who had grown up around gang violence, industrial decline, social decline, who could smell trouble about to happen. They might have not known what the trouble was, but they could smell it coming. And that in any platoon where that person was the sergeant or the lieutenant, they avoided getting blown up in firefights. So they deliberately structured a system of if you see three anomalies, three things that made you go well that's odd. The rule is if you see an anomaly, you must say you've seen one and once a group see three anomalies, you must take action.
David Olney:It is not negotiable And I think that three anomalies and you must take action rule. If most organizations could learn that and you need to trust the most junior person who does the most junior thing to say I just saw an anomaly at my level. That is your first anomaly count. That must be trusted. Otherwise, how are you going to know when you've really got three?
David Olney:And yet this is the biggest problem in big complicated organizations is too often they think the anomalies have to be really complex and that only people with twenty years experience will see them. No. A switched on junior person is at the coal faced. They're going to see the smallest new thing first. So yeah, the classic example on an aircraft carrier of this is the 19 year old who has been on a catapult crew for two weeks.
David Olney:Doesn't think the catapult looks right. Says no to launching a fighter aircraft. And the captain of an aircraft carrier will come down and say well done. You did exactly what I want you to do. Even if it turns out the catapult was fine, it didn't look like it was in the normal range and the 19 year old did the right thing.
David Olney:And on an aircraft carrier, they work with a one anomaly model, not a three anomaly model.
Dan Fahy:Fascinating. And then I'm really interested in your advice for two for two cohorts here. Let's say, first of all, you're talking to a management group who are perhaps there, to use your descriptions, they've spotted sufficient number of anomalies or there are some obvious shocks making their way through the system, and they are newly invigorated about needing to make some change or think about the complexity that's in front of them. What would your counsel to long tenured management be about how they need to set themselves up to enter this period of thinking and acting in complexity?
David Olney:The big thing that needs to normally change and, you know, the the real expert on this is an American psychologist called Gary Klein. He's worked with every kind of organization under the sun. And what he realized is the longer things go well, the more management tends to settle on refining yesterday. How can we refine yesterday? And the example Gary Klein gave to me when I interviewed him was David, you know, imagine you have sharpened a kitchen knife to this ultra ultra fine edge where it just slides through a tomato.
David Olney:If all you ever cut was tomatoes, you know refining that edge to that point is brilliant. But what happens the day you try and cut a steak off from round a bone and you chip or roll that edge? You haven't looked beyond refining the system and really the first move once you think you've got anomalies is to go. We don't want to refine the system anymore. We want insights into the things we're not seeing because we're focusing on refinement.
David Olney:And insights again normally come from listening to everyone. What thing is wasting your time? Where is there friction? Where's there an anomaly? Where is there something that you see if you don't fix it at your level, someone's going to get a worse cascade later on.
David Olney:So switching from refining yesterday to looking for insights about what's different today, is a first really big step for any management team. And that can be really uncomfortable because I'm often quite rude in different organizations. Do you have managers or do you have leaders? You know, in my parlance, managers were fine yesterday, leaders prepare us for tomorrow. And any organization needs both, and the majority of organizations don't have both.
David Olney:They have to build leaders because it's so unfamiliar. Fascinating.
Dan Fahy:And then moving on to the second constituency, what about people who are in the middle of an organization who are really at the coalface of navigating through these complex transitions or are seeing these anomalies right in front of them. What... What's your counsel to people who are not in the managerial ranks but are in the doing part of the organization, the middle of the organization? How'd you counsel them to set themselves up for doing their own style of leadership in complexity?
David Olney:They were the people who really convinced me to go back and do a masters in strategic communication and quit teaching in universities because I've taught thousands of people to solve complex problems. And I kept hearing exactly the same thing from my students, whether it was 20 year old undergrads going to the public service, people going on into big law firms, didn't really matter, or elite soldiers going on deployment. They said, David, solving the problems, not really that difficult. You've given us really good tools on top of the tools we had. I can solve most problems.
David Olney:My team can solve most problems. The problem is working out how to get the people above us who are used to managing to refine yesterday, to get them to allocate resources, to deal with something that disturbs their world. And I really had to go and study strategic communications for two years to get the answer to what was missing. The fundamental answer for people in the middle of organizations is you are working on the problem at the level you're at. The people above you aren't working on the problem.
David Olney:They have their own problem. And their own problem is about the nature and structure of the organization. How resources are allocated. How personal fiefdoms work. So the simple rule is if you're in the middle of an organization, don't solve the problem.
David Olney:Solve their problem. Contextualize whatever you need and want to do and whatever critical thing you've seen in terms of the person above you and what is relevant to them in their great desire to make today like yesterday.
Dan Fahy:That's really interesting because I think when you hear the term strategic communications, certainly for me, my mind goes to a sort of top down communications apparatus. But I think the way you framed it there, it's it's really embedding a sense of strategic communication smarts right into the middle of the organization so that a person can communicate strategically with their management Yep. Rather than their management communicating to their to their teams of individuals.
David Olney:Absolutely. If we don't have bidirectional communication, we're just waiting for failure. It's that simple. If communication only goes from the top down, we're doomed in any organization. And again, another reason why I happily got out of universities, because even though they claim they listen to voices from lower down the hierarchy, in reality, there is so much power, so much status, so many personal fiefdoms at the top of the organization that it's about 90% flow down, about 10% flow up.
David Olney:In comparison, you go in to an emergency department in a hospital when they talk about something that happened yesterday and go, how could we have done it differently? And everyone gets to speak down to the medical technician who makes the machines work. You're more like 60% of information coming down from the top, 40% going back up from the bottom. You look at an elite military unit, it's more like fifty fifty.
Dan Fahy:And, David, how much of approaching problems or complexity is a technical task? It's about analysis and strategy formulation and action and delivery. And how much of it is about the human dimension, the the psychology of change and complexity?
David Olney:I think this is one of these things that's changed probably over the last twenty to thirty years from what I can work out in the literature. When we had relative stability in most things, problem solving was largely technical. You had a bunch of people who had a bunch of skills who worked together to solve a technical problem in their area because it didn't necessarily flow on to somewhere else or bleed into things they weren't aware of. Whereas the faster technology moves and the faster economics and politics changes, the more that the principal issue to be dealt with now is the psychological willingness to address reality as it is, and to confront the fact that everything that got you to where you are today is not necessarily good enough to get you to where you need to be tomorrow. Like confronting that yesterday's expertise isn't necessarily gonna be tomorrow's expertise and dealing with the psychological implications of you may have hit the limits of what you know and need to ask for help and need to listen someone with different skills.
David Olney:So very much we're now in the world of David Epstein's idea that the generalists are critically important because who else can bring everyone together and get them to talk to each other? That's a radical shift from the specialist team doing their thing in the nineteen nineties. You know, very different psychology.
Dan Fahy:And when you think about applying or manifesting that shift in an organization's culture, are there ways you can organically upskill people around that, or really is it about bringing in a mix of individuals who are more already in that space role modeling the type of behavior that that this new environment commands?
David Olney:It's a bit of both. If you've got an infect... You know, an inflexible management layer, you really need to replace them because they got where they got by being inflexible. Normally, in most organizations, if you look from the midpoint down, you've still got massive amount of intellectual and psychological flexibility. Because these people haven't yet invested in being one thing every day and forgetting how to be all the other things.
David Olney:So really you need to push growth and change down as low as you can, and promote people from that level as fast as you can, and be willing to remove fairly senior people who had consistency for too long and are actually feeling threatened by inconsistency rather than excited about doing a better job. David Olney, thank
Dan Fahy:you so much for this very broad but also quite detailed path through how to think about complexity. It's been very, very interesting, and I'm sure the audience will find it very inspiring. Thank you
David Olney:very much, Dan, for the opportunity to speak with you. That was David Olney. I hope you got
Dan Fahy:as much from this conversation as I did. Thanks for listening. I'm Dan Fay. Original music by Lee Roseveer and So Cal. And if you like this episode, please share with a friend or colleague.