Situation: Complex

Hi, welcome to the twenty sixth day of The Leads intellectual challenge: a 30-day challenge with Fatai Kareem. If you would like to learn more about evaluatory situation, read the twenty fifth day challenge here.

Today, he will be discussing another type of situation known as complex situation. What happens when you try to solve a problem only to make it worse? Why do you conduct root cause analysis? Why do you take careful and cautious considerations before making a decision?

Well, understanding complex situation will make you to know the importance of being careful and cautious before making a decision. What is complex situation?

Complex situation is a situation that occurs to complicate or worsen a condition. This is a situation that makes it difficult to handle a condition by making it to get worse or greater than the capacity or ability of the person affected. This kind of situation usually exists as a problem or challenge which requires large amount of resources for it to be managed effectively and efficiently. It could render a person incompetent, inefficient, ineffective, or weak by bringing up conditions that are more than what the person can handle or bear.

This situation may involve retrogressive condition such that solution applied to its complexity, problem or challenge, instead of leading to a desirable outcome, it makes the condition to get worse than before. In this case, improvement maybe replaced with setbacks. This maybe due to unknown root cause. Hence, wrong solutions are applied to the challenge, which in turn fail to yield positive outcome.

This situation may involve interdependent relationship between multiple conditions such that when one condition is affected, other conditions will be affected as well. In this case, cautious and careful effort needs to be taken to understand how best to handle these conditions in order to prevent the whole system from breaking down. 

This situation may also involve larger gap such that the gap between the current state of the condition to be improved and the improved state is too wide, hence difficulty involved in filling this gap is also greater. This maybe due to the need of more resources than available, or other constraints that are beyond the capacity of the condition.

The situation may also involve uncertainty such that there is no predictable pattern that can aid predicting or forecasting what could happen if a decision is taken. This exposes you to a greater risk. Therefore, making it difficult to perform some actions or make a sound decision with the assurance that desirable outcome will be achieved.

This situation may also involve sacrifice or confusion such that there is a need to choose between two or more conditions with greater loss or impact. This has to do with making a choice to save one thing out of many important things, which under normal circumstances, you will safeguard them against harm or danger. And the impact of losing these things is greater or dreadful. This puts you in a state of confusion as to which one you are to save at the expense of other things.

Simplicity is essential for eliminating complexity and the challenges that come with it. This can be achieved by breaking long-term activities into short-term ones such that each activity can be done within short period of time with ease, and their successes contribute to the success of the long-term activities. Likewise, larger component can be made into smaller ones such that each smaller component can be integrated or combined to form the larger component with ease and faster. Process mapping and value stream mapping with the aim of improving the process such that waste and defects are eliminated, are also essential to eliminating the challenges of complex situation. Where the root cause is unknown, root cause analysis can be helpful. While proper control measures and constant review should be put in place.

Case study

1. Femi really loves her mother. His wife just gets pregnant after 8 years of marriage. Unfortunately, the brake of his car fails while driving. In front of him is a wall which if he hits it, he will die. By his left hand side is a road where his mother is, which if he turns to that road, he will kill her and be saved. By his right hand side is another road where his wife is, which if he turns to that road, he will kill his wife and be saved. What will he do?

2. Employees at XYZ ltd are not punctual and this is affecting the productivity of the company. A stricter policy is enforced by the management to make the employees to be punctual. However, most of the employees resign and leave the company. Is the problem solved? What could have made these employees to resign? 

Disclaimer: All names used are for illustration purpose.

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