Typically, when courage does occur in an organization, it operates like a self-organizing system in which the neighborhood effect is in play. First, one person takes a risk; then the person next to them takes the risk. Soon everyone at the table is “flocking” around the act of candor. The starting point for this courageous tipping point is unpredictable, momentary, surprising, and often transforming. We usually can’t determine beforehand when organizational courage will be exhibited or who will be the courageous person–though we are often terrific Monday morning quarterbacks. We can’t accurately predict when or where the first act of courage will be engaged. However, later on we can look for points of connection in our system (there are often many). We can follow this up with analyses regarding how and why this impactful connection took place. In the future, we might be able to do a better job of predicting courage. However, the manifestation of courage is still likely to surprise us, and a rogue event is likely to occur.
A second example of the rogue event (as it relates to leadership) comes from a quite different source: John Lennon of the Beatles. Before his death, Lennon often told a story about the police who were protecting John and the Beatles at a concert in Los Angeles. The crowd became very excited during the concert. Members of the crowd began to storm the stage located in the middle of a baseball field. The police began clubbing members of the crowd. Serious injury was eminent as members of the crowd became more agitated and the police grew more anxious about their own safety, as well as the safety of the Beatles. In a remarkable rogue action, John Lennon suddenly stopped the concert. He calmly told the police that “these people will not harm us, so please don’t harm them.” The crowd and police immediately ceased their confrontation, everyone quieted down, and the Beatles completed their concert with no further incidents. This exemplified the intrusion of courage or optimism into a complex and highly charged event. This one action, by John Lennon, manifests self-organizing criticality and dramatically changed the emotions and behaviors of all people who were involved in the concert–as did actions taken by the Senior Vice President and his vice-presidential subordinate at the retreat setting.
The Delay Function
Complex systems are challenging to understand and manage not only because all of the parts of this system are interconnected but also because the nature of the connection between all of the parts is quite diverse. Complex human systems do not operate like a Swiss watch (or any other kind of machine) with carefully crafted connections between all of its parts. Rather, a human system operates as a messy living entity with inconsistent connections between parts. Sometimes the parts are connected through physical links (as in interlocking gears), while at other times they are connected via shared information and coordinated execution. This messiness is also found in the ongoing allostatic adjustments being made in anticipation of changing environmental conditions. These allostatic predictions being made become even more challenging when differing information is being received and integrated by these different parts. Given these differing sources of information, it is difficult to coordinate actions to be taken by these interconnected parts to address these predictions.
There may be something of greatest importance than difference in the information receives. These are the differences to be found in the amount of delay occurring in the sharing of information or resources from one unit of the system to other units in the system. There are also delays in the predictions being made by each part. The adjustment being made based on these predictions is also delayed. Without the comfort of a mechanistic homeostatic model of biological and organizational functioning, the delays to be found in a system can throw a wrench into its Allostatic workings. Delays can mess up the Allostatic process and lead one to simple predictions and fast thinking that are based on a false and manufactured (heuristic) sense of reality.
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