Managers, Embrace Your Future: Uncertainty and Risk

Don't look to large companies for lessons in management. We need to look elsewhere for a steer on the management thinking that will take us through the 21st century.

In his 2007 book "The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argued that management must move away from the big business principles.

So it's timely that the first Global Peter Drucker Forum, Managing for the Future, occurs in Vienna later this year.

Its agenda is a microcosm of what the new management thinking should be about -- adaptability, innovation, and high engagement.

Managers will need to become used to living with the idea that their organisation is akin to a complex adaptive system -- made up of differing agents that interact with, and adapt to, each other, as in a beehive.

Most of what we take for granted as simple and static, proves to be a complex adaptive system, including ourselves. Ecosystems, beehives, and immune systems all have lessons to teach managers.

Instead of viewing the company as essentially a simple entity, albeit with many facets, tomorrow's managers will need to view their enterprise through a complexity lens, realising that they have limited powers to affect change.

The apparent aura of certainty that has pervaded much of management in recent years will have to give way to living more comfortably with uncertainty, coping with ambiguity and learning to handle risk.

In many organisations, people with contrary views may have been sidelined or forced to take a low profile. From now on, managers will need to be more adept at creating inclusiveness, respecting differences and turning diversity into a practical reality.

Complex adaptive systems are a relatively new way of thinking about the world and how to manage organisations.

Inconveniently they do not offer a model for predicting what will happen, which is why they can be hard to grasp for those managers who pride themselves on a regimented approach to decision-making.

The upside is that the approach offers a lot more choice and more freedom to act than the old mechanistic view of management.

Here's how it compares with traditional management: