Eric Herbelin is a results-driven executive in the transformational and change leadership space, sharing opinions online about leadership, change, growth, innovation, data and analytics.
On his personal website and in the media, Herbelin discusses how to build the leadership skills required to empower teams, improve the customer experience and create a culture of ownership. By promoting both accountability and belonging, Herbelin has built businesses and launched new products in nearly every major continent.
Having operated in many markets across the globe with unique caveats and considerations, Herbelin says it takes grit and a complex understanding of various markets and how they operate to grow an enterprise effectively. A strategy that works in one market may not work in another. Along the way there may also be setbacks, and there may be objectives that even seem impossible, but by understanding complexity and navigating it effectively, it’s possible to meet challenges head-on and overcome them.
Breaking Down Complexity Theory
One theory that attempts to explain and unravel complex systems is Complexity Theory. It’s made up of four different theories used to model and analyze complex systems. A combination of Systems Theory, Chaos Theory, Network Theory and Adaptive Systems Theory.
Here is a breakdown of each of these theories:
Systems Theory: Imagine a big city. Each building like a hospital or a fire station is important and needs to work in conjunction with the others for the whole city to function. Systems Theory helps us understand how these different pieces fit together and change over time.
Chaos Theory: Imagine you’re trying to guess where a bouncing ball will go next. It might look random, but it’s not. If you understand how the ball bounces, you can predict it. Chaos Theory helps us study things that seem random but actually follow hidden rules, like the bouncing ball, the weather, or the stock market.
Network Theory: This is like studying how your friends are connected on social media. Who talks to who and who influences who? Network Theory looks at these connections in the real world. It delves into who you should know in business, or for example, how quickly a new iPhone will sell based on how people talk about it.
Adaptive Systems Theory: Imagine a flock of birds. While no single bird is the leader, they all manage to fly in a pattern. This theory helps us understand how groups or systems can organize themselves without someone being in charge, like how a busy market works, how political movements form. The ebb and flow between political parties that hold power can be partially attributed to Adaptive Systems Theory, while of course, there are many other factors at play also. It’s important to acknowledge that there are also other reasons for these shifts.
The reason for integrating an approach to executive leadership that integrates complexity theory is because many businesses waste time and effort on exerting control over systems. They maintain a large centralized system to control their organizational structure. It’s a top-down approach that tries to approach business from a linear view from inside of what is a very non-linear system. Environmental events, economic changes, waning public sentiment or even cultural influences can affect how a business performs, and many of these are external.
While the centralized system within your organization should never go away, an understanding of complexity theory can allow executives to focus on what they actually can control and let go of the elements that are outside of their control. This helps the organization become flatter and potentially leaner, reducing costs and improving quality.
Integrating Complexity Theory within an Organization
Complexity theory doesn’t have to be difficult to understand or laden with jargon and esoteric strategies. It’s all about decentralizing the decision-making process to flatten the organization and make it more efficient. In simpler terms, it means giving various people and departments within the organization the autonomy and authority to make decisions to respond to volatile situations and environments.
What makes complexity theory unique is that it’s about first auditing internal and external networks before executing an agile plan or framework. By breaking down the organization into systems, examining the flow of internal and external communications and how groups of systems within and external to the organization conduct themselves, it becomes much easier to empower your team to make decisions.
You also learn how to empower teams – for what tasks and for which objectives. Rather than empowering teams on all fronts or just for the sake of giving them autonomy, you learn for what tasks and why. While employee empowerment in general actually does hold value, gaining a thorough understanding of the organization as a system allows you to build a robust and holistic strategy that brings order to chaos.
As BBVA puts it in their article entitled, Order from chaos: How to apply complexity theory at work, – “All organizations operate at what is known as the edge of chaos.”
To summarize complexity theory, it’s simply another leadership framework used to pin down the complex internal and external systems within an organization. It then attempts to inform leaders within an organization to decide how and where to grant decision-making authority to decentralize the organization. With more moving parts that function autonomously, there is more ability to pivot and adapt to changes.
Rather than approaching leadership from a top-down framework, using Complexity Theory can help assign, empower and respond using every layer of the organization as a dynamic and interconnected system. It’s a way to control the chaos and seeming randomness by heightening the organization’s ability to respond and pivot. By actually letting go of control and empowering the entire organization, complexity theory can serve to systemize an organization and drive it forward.
The Complexity of International Markets
Earlier in his career while appointed to work in France, Herbelin was assigned a project to fix the credit rating of legal entities within a totally separate business unit. He was also tasked to accomplish this on a short timeline.
While not deliberately integrating complexity theory as a science, his approach embodies many of the principles of complexity theory. Since the project was on a short timeline and many different tasks needed to be accomplished, he knew it would be impossible to approach the assignment top-down.
“At the time, it was result-oriented, so I got the team together and said that there is one thing we are going to do, and this is what we’re going to do. I also told them the time we had available to do it.”
Herbelin pinned down all the components of the project, delved into the data, created systems and frameworks, isolated any potential chaotic elements at work to mitigate them, modeled the communications workflow, liaise with other executives who communicated to all departments, mapped the internal and external systems at play, then empowered the entire team to execute relentlessly.
The project was a major success, and Herbelin continued to gain the trust of the organization before going on to operate and successfully launch more products in continents across the globe.
A Summary of Complexity Theory
By breaking down the web of systems within an organization, unpacking the chaos, understanding the networks and promoting adaptability, Herbelin demonstrates how empowering all layers of an organization creates a more agile and resilient enterprise.
It’s not about rigid control, but understanding the complex dynamics at play, communicating them and empowering your team to respond to them in the present and the future.
His systematic approach showcases that the real power in leadership lies in the ability to audit before decisively adapting, empowering and thriving amid complexity.
