The outlook for the market in which you compete is uncertain, and the range of factors that influence it is bewildering. The demands on you are greater than ever, as your span of control increases whilst the time available in which to take decisions shortens.

The penalties for getting it wrong are becoming more severe: the current financial crisis is caused by failure to manage complexity in a highly dynamic environment. Traditional management thinking is designed to manage people, processes, and business functions, but most textbooks have little useful to say on managing complexity. Management of complexity is perhaps the single most important task in business today, and most of us are ill equipped to deal with it. We cannot cope with highly complex situations, so we narrow our focus, relying on tools and techniques from our past: we direct our attention towards that which we want or expect to see, and fail to notice the things we are not looking for. In effect, we unwittingly mis-direct ourselves.