An old proverb says, “May you live in interesting times.” Our generation has indeed been granted this wish. For at least a decade, we have been acutely aware that technological advancement not only progresses, but it does so exponentially. Furthermore, in the last four years, we have faced a series of geopolitical shocks.
The IT sector has always felt like surfing on waves, but these events have stirred the ocean we navigate. The industry’s responses have increased complexity. The rise of cloud computing, AI, regulations, and more has complicated our environment further.
For the purpose of this blog, I would kindly invite you to dig into the beginnings of your technical careers. Take a moment and try to count the number of people you needed to interact with to ship whatever you were developing or launching. Even better, count the number of layers between you and the actual client. And try to remember the number of lines of code or commands you needed to write to get the result. I bet the number is smaller the older you are 😊. At least when I try to remember my so-called code in Visual Basic, which produced specific mainframe passwords for the team members, and compare it to sophisticated IAM solutions today, there is a significant gap.
Sure, nobody wants to return to the era when we ran software just so one or a couple of users could get results in a few minutes. We are super happy with systems that are available to us every second of the day, secure and prompt whenever we need them. So it’s no wonder we are now struggling with the complexity of technology, organizations, and our day-to-day teamwork.
Last year at QED, we talked about Playground. To quote Scott E. Page: “Complex systems are inherently interesting, producers of amazing novelty, and not clean and simple, which makes them a lively playground for the mind.”
So yes, we jumped from one playground (the general one) to another. And we don’t just want to address complexity as an issue. We really aim to find solutions, paths, and ideas for tackling it better.
It is obvious that old-fashioned command and control doesn’t work when it comes to complex organizations or situations. And very often, we do not have time to wait for solutions to emerge. They say that in complex systems, one node cannot control anything but can influence everything.
When and how do we build new communication channels to create value, and when do we cut some to avoid stifling creativity with too many information streams? These and many more topics await us in a little over 6 months. Once again, we meet in Zadar with the serious task of simplifying our work, technology, and, as a result, our lives.