Dr. Constantin Malik explores strategies for simplifying decision-making in complex environments, emphasizing cybernetics, systems thinking, and the Syntegration model. He highlights the role of collective intelligence, adaptability, and human judgment in navigating organizational transformations and accelerating effective decision-making.
It seems that complexity is deeply rooted in your culture and has been so for thousands of years. This perhaps gives you an inherent understanding of how to handle and navigate complexity. I’ve only been in India for a week but I must say, this is certainly the most complex country I’ve visited. I believe you don’t truly understand complexity until you’ve experienced India.
I have great respect for your leaders, politically and otherwise, for managing this complexity. Unlike our countries, which are more rule-based societies, yours is a principle-based society. There is a distinction in complexity science between algorithms and heuristics. The world talks about algorithms, but in the face of complexity, algorithms are often useless; we need heuristics, guidelines, and principles. An algorithm is a formula to find, whereas a heuristic is more like a formula to search.
I hope to offer something new and interesting, especially from a scientific perspective. Our organisation was founded 40 years ago by my father, Professor Dr. Frederick Malik. I’m very proud of him; he is considered one of the foremost management thinkers in the German-speaking countries and probably in Europe. He founded our organisation, the Malik Institute, 40 years ago out of the University of St. Gallen. It’s a small but illustrious university in eastern Switzerland, and it championed the systems-oriented management approach.
The Legacy of Stafford Beer
The idea behind this approach was that for managing organisations, we might learn more from complexity sciences—cybernetics, system science, and bionics—than from business administration alone. Business administration is necessary but not sufficient; other sciences can help us navigate complexity. The notion was that the 21st century would be an age of complexity, and those who know how to navigate it will have a competitive edge.
One of the great pioneers, Stafford Beer, is considered the Father of Management Cybernetics. He was a very close friend of my father and mine, and we continue his legacy. He was a lover of India, spending much time here, stationed as the commander of a Gurkha regiment, and was himself a tantric yogi. Fluent in Sanskrit, he was deeply inspired by Indian culture, which influenced all his writings and developments. He saw no difference between his spiritual experiences and cybernetic and complexity science.
He believed that complexity must be designed to minimise harm to people and assets. If we let complexity play out without design, it often leads to negative consequences. Therefore, it needs to be designed to guide us through complexity and use it to our advantage for the best outcomes for our organisations and people.
Double S-Curves
We view the 21st century as the age of complexity, marking a great transformation for both society and organisations. We use two double S curves to depict this transformation. One curve represents the present: our current customers, technology, knowledge, people, and products. The other curve represents the future: our future customers, products, knowledge, and the people we will need. To transition from the present to the future, there is a critical, disruptive decision zone where we must make pivotal decisions, shift resources, acquire new knowledge, and develop new organisational structures and strategies. This is where significant change happens, and we must train and enable people for the new.
4 Drivers of Transformation
There are four main drivers for transformation today:
- Demography: Different parts of the world experience demographic changes differently. In our countries, we face aging populations, whereas in South and Southeast Asia, the situation is different. Economic changes follow these demographic shifts.
- Ecology and Climate: There is a significant shift towards sustainability, including in India.
- Technology: This is perhaps the greatest shift, especially digitalisation, which connects everything and creates complexity. When things become interconnected and elements network together, complexity arises.
- Economics: A lot of debt in the world impacts economic stability and transformation.
Simplifying Complexity?
Complexity often leads to the need for simplifying decision-making. Most people think about simplifying complexity when faced with it. It’s often said, “Keep it simple.” While that may be a popular strategy, it’s fundamentally flawed when dealing with complexity. Simplifying complexity is not just wrong; it’s dead wrong.
A German biologist once said that higher capabilities come from higher complexity. You can understand human evolution and evolution in general, as a path towards ever greater complexity. The human brain, to our knowledge, is the most complex steering and control system that nature has devised. Your brain, with its complexity, is what makes you who you are. Everything of a higher order exhibits higher complexity, and we need to harness that complexity. Yet, most organisations avoid it because they don’t know how to navigate it. We need to simplify decision-making by using complexity as a resource to find faster, easier, clearer solutions to our complex problems.
The Syntegration Model
In our organisation, we have developed a method called “Syntegration.” We believe it’s the most powerful tool for addressing complex problems and managing complex transformations. Syntegration is designed to help organisations and society navigate an optimal path of development, avoiding the pitfalls of getting stuck on the red S-curve and missing out on the green S-curve. It’s much faster than traditional tools, which is crucial given the rapid pace of change.
The name Syntegration combines “synergy” and “integration.” It is a method to find optimal solutions for any kind of complex problem in the fastest possible time—days, not months or years. It involves all relevant stakeholders. Complex questions require a lot of knowledge and people because complexity demands a diverse array of expertise.
Syntegration allows you to involve all necessary people and find consensus behind joint solutions. It maximises collective intelligence. While artificial intelligence is disrupting many fields and may replace many jobs, it’s people who remain. I believe there is immense creativity in people and organisations. Collective intelligence, harnessed through our joint efforts, yields solutions that cannot be found alone. Decision-making should not be left solely to artificial intelligence. Even with the best data, decisions need to be implemented, and people need to be brought along. Most transformations fail because people lack insight, ownership, and buy-in.
Syntegration is a collective think tank customised to solve individual problems, enabling a large group of people to work like one brain. It uses geometric designs, such as the icosahedron, to optimize information and communication flow among large groups. This structure, found in nature, maximises the distribution of knowledge, views, and languages. The relationship among people determines how communication happens, and this design optimizes it.
Optimising Communication
You may be familiar with the “Chinese whispers” game, where one-way communication, without feedback happens. We know it produces nonsense. Similarly, in corporate structures, messages get distorted as they move through layers. We aim to optimise the use of information, not just maximise power. Small teams work well for simple problems, but what about large groups? This is where the icosahedron comes in, allowing large groups to communicate and work effectively, like small teams.
We break down complex challenges into the most important topics to solve a challenge. These topics represent the corners of the structure, allowing 12 topics to be discussed simultaneously. Each person discusses two topics, ensuring a self-organizing and self-optimising flow of communication and information. This method distributes up to 90-95% of knowledge, ideas, and viewpoints around the structure, creating a deep understanding and enabling joint solutions through an iterative process.
The participants can agree on joint solutions. It aligns them. It gives them buy-in and ownership of the decisions that need to be made to tackle complex problems. Imagine, for example, your organisation wants to go global, grow ambitiously, introduce new technology, or become sustainable in everything it does. These are all complex problems that require the involvement of many people. With Syntegration, you can bring in all the necessary individuals—your finance team, marketing team, sales team, product experts, decision-makers on the board, outside experts, and even customers. All of these people can work together like one individual brain to find common solutions that everyone agrees on and is aligned with, ensuring successful implementation.
Aligning Hearts and Minds
We often lack understanding in our organisations, which leads to barriers and lack of buy-in. Creating 360-degree views and understanding each other’s opinions can create common solutions that work on the highest common denominator, rather than just a minimal compromise. In a nutshell, Syntegration is about three “A”s: amplification, alignment, and acceleration. It amplifies the collective intelligence of your people, bringing out all the creativity, co-creation, and participation you can wish for. It aligns the hearts and minds of people, allowing for ownership and commitment on higher levels.Most importantly, it accelerates the decision-making process. It provides clarity and speeds up the decision-making process, which is crucial for navigating complexity. Syntegration simplifies decision-making by providing direction, precision, and speed. We believe that in the future, more organisations will navigate complexity in this way. Complexity can be tackled, mastered, and used as a resource in a human way.
People are the most important resource, especially in a country of 1.4 billion people. That’s an incredible treasure trove of creativity and knowledge that needs to be harnessed. Tacit knowledge in our organisations and society is waiting to be made explicit, and by doing so, we can find solutions to complex problems.
Q: People and communication are important, but is not the leadership that makes the difference?
Dr Malik: I don’t think leadership is less important, but I believe that leadership can benefit from syntegration. A good leader takes into consideration the opinions of their people and makes the most of the information, knowledge, and expertise that these people offer.
If a leader doesn’t trust the people, that’s a different problem. The best you can do is use people to their fullest potential. This method can amplify leadership by providing all the information and potential within your organisation for tackling complex problems. It doesn’t make leadership less important; it amplifies it. In Syntegration, leaders need to be present and part of the process. However, they have an equal role to everyone else. Syntegration is a completely non-hierarchical structure where leaders don’t play an extra role. They are part of the whole process, contributing equally.
Q: Is a flat organisation ideal for cybernetics?
Dr Malik: It all depends on how you handle it. While I’m a fan of flat organisations, from a cybernetic point of view, it’s not necessarily about having a flat or large organisation. Stafford Beer, who discovered the viable system model, created a structural model for organisations based on the human nervous system. This model includes levels of recursion that enable organisations with many levels to function excellently, quickly, and effectively.
Flat organisations can certainly be advantageous, especially as they enable us to reduce layers, making communication easier. However, having organisational levels doesn’t necessarily mean an organisation must be less effective. The key is how well the structure supports communication, decision-making, and overall function.
Q: Is collective intelligence think-tank a permanent arrangement or a temporary arrangement to address specific issues?
N. Sivasubramanian: Syntegration is typically a three to three-and-a-half-day workshop designed to solve a specific issue. However, it’s always beneficial to maintain collective intelligence within an organisation. Whether the organisation becomes self-regulating or people come together periodically, having this collective intelligence is valuable.
Dr Malik: There are different ways to apply it. Syntegration is often used to tackle individual challenges. Ideally, it should be applied regularly. For example, you can use it to pace your organisation or a project, bringing coherence when things go out of balance. You can also use it at regular intervals to address recurring issues because circumstances, environments, and people change over time. Therefore, it can be done both as a temporary arrangement for specific issues and as a regular practice to adjust and navigate changes.
Q: What role do emerging technologies like AI and big data play in simplifying the decision-making process? How can they be leveraged effectively? Are they popular and effective with management professionals?
Dr Malik: Emerging technologies like AI and big data do simplify the decision-making process. However, there’s a danger that we might lose ourselves in data. As a cybernetician, I focus on the essential variables that steer a system, not on gathering as much data as possible. Excessive data can confuse rather than clarify. The key is to identify the guiding star within all the data.
There’s a risk in giving artificial intelligence too much power to make decisions. No matter how much data we have, there’s always a conscious decision to be made. Sometimes, gut feelings contradict the data. AI lacks this intuitive sense, so it shouldn’t replace human decision-making, especially for higher-level or complex questions. However, AI can significantly boost our ability to make decisions, supporting and accelerating the process.
While AI and big data are popular and effective with management professionals, it’s crucial to use them as tools to enhance human judgment rather than replace it. They can provide valuable insights and streamline decision-making, but the final decision should still rest with human judgment.
Q: How can decision-makers avoid over-reliance on technology and ensure that human judgment remains central to the process, particularly in the area of manufacturing and relevant to MSMEs?
Dr Malik: On the one hand, it’s about being conscious of this balance. It’s a choice that we make, and we have to ensure that human judgment remains integral to our processes. One effective way to achieve this is by building systems that inherently integrate human involvement. For example, through Syntegration, we give agency to our people, not just to technology. By incorporating human judgment into the system, we prevent it from being overshadowed by technology.
Q: How do cultural or organisational factors influence the way complexity is perceived and managed in decision-making?
Dr Malik: Being not of this culture, perhaps I can add something interesting. Culture always comes up in discussions, but it’s important to distinguish between two aspects. There’s the culture of an individual country or organisation, and there’s a universal culture of achieving results, professionalism, and effectiveness.
When you look at well-run companies, they are managed similarly everywhere. For instance, if Air India or Indigo Air work well, they operate just as effectively as Lufthansa, despite the cultural differences in expression. I’m from Europe, so let me illustrate with the difference between a German and an Italian. An Italian may gesture a lot and be loud, while a German may be very quiet. However, their methods of achieving good results for their corporation are very similar. This is where culture can often be confused. We need to focus on the similarities, as they provide valuable lessons for our corporations and decision-making processes. The differences, in my opinion, are beautiful and what makes us human. But by recognising our similarities, we can learn together and move forward.
Q: What strategies or principles do you recommend for making decisions in situations where information is incomplete or rapidly evolving?
N. Sivasubramanian: You will rarely have complete information when making decisions. There will always be some gaps. Having a structure and co-creating solutions can help cover those gaps.
Dr Malik: There are several cybernetic principles to consider. For example, using a heuristic approach instead of an algorithmic one. One principle is to always act in a way that increases your options. However, this is not always possible. Sometimes, you have to make a decisive choice and proceed with it.
Q: What role does emotional intelligence play in simplifying and improving decision-making at the leadership level?
Dr Malik: I’m not an expert on emotional intelligence, but I believe it plays an important role. Empathy is incredibly important in organisations . Management is about achieving results, and that’s crucial for our organisations. However, there are different ways to achieve those results. I believe it’s extremely important to show empathy and emotional intelligence in dealing with people.
While not everyone has the same degree of emotional intelligence, an effective manager needs to exhibit it to achieve results. Empathy and emotional intelligence help in understanding and motivating people, building trust, and fostering a positive work environment. This human factor is essential for successful leadership and decision-making.
Q: What are the common pitfalls or biases that individuals and organisations should watch out for when simplifying complex decisions?
Dr Malik: One common pitfall in decision-making is the assumption that the problem is clear. With complex problems, there is generally much more to the matter than what you initially believe. It’s essential to be aware of this and take a step back. Including other people in the process can help ensure that you gather the most information possible at this point.
In the first iteration, you may have something, but going through a second iteration can help avoid some of the biases. This enriches your solution because you will carry information from other group meetings. By the second iteration, many biases are typically avoided, and the structure of the process works to improve the outcome.
