Taking what I learned from “The Extended Mind,” where physical location influences cognition, I’m writing to you today from my back deck. It’s 70F (21C) and the forecast for the next week doesn’t get above 45F (7C), so I’m taking advantage of the nice weather before it leaves.
The dogs are out here with me, laying on their sides, tongues poured out onto the wood, looking like they’ve melted in the sun.
In the spirit of open accountability, even though this looks very red, here’s how I did on my wellness goals in 2024:
✅ My VO2Max went up 3 pts to 46 ❌ My resting heart rate didn’t budge (I wanted it down 8 pts to 52) ❌ Missed getting a 200 lb clean ❌ Missed getting 10 strict pullups ❌ Missed getting 150 35 lb kettlebell swings in 5 minutes ❌ I did not do a 12 mile ruck ✅ I did 300K steps each month all year.
I honestly forgot that I had the kettlebell and ruck goals in there until I reviewed my goals to write this 😬🤣 I had way too many different goals, and I just couldn’t fit all of the weekly habits into my life. Lesson learned!
I am happy that I consistently worked out all year, which is how I was able to move my VO2Max, which is important for longevity, up three points. I also consistently walked, hitting 3.9 million steps (10,700 each day on average).
For 2025 I’ll have three wellness goals: 1️⃣ - Improve body composition. I’ll either do a DEXA scan and use body fat percentage, or I’ll use a strength goal, like adding up all my Olympic lifts. 2️⃣ - Reduce physiological stress. I’ll probably use Heart Rate Variability. 3️⃣ - Improve my ‘engine’ of performance. This will be VO2Max.
What are you working on this year? Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz. I’ll be your friendly accountability buddy. 😁
Kevin
A Quote
“
If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you.
When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter.
Those are the moments that are truly precious, and that no technology can produce for you.
Run after your obsessions with everything you have.
— Tiago Forte, "Building a Second Brain"
Three Things
1 - 🤖 Using AI to Create Applications - If you haven’t seen some of the new tools you can use to create mobile or web applications without being a software developer, check out this video as an example. I’m excited about how I could use this to develop quick MVPs of ideas or create custom software just for me. If you’ve been successful with this, let me know!
2 - 📚 Fable.co, A GoodReads Competitor - I use GoodReads all the time, but its design is a little outdated. I found an alternative, Fable.co. It’s an upstart, so it’s missing some things, but it excels at the social / book club element. If you don’t need the Kindle integration and data like I do, you might love this.
3 - 🎒 PVKRD Camera Backpack - I last bought a camera bag in 2009, so this upgrade feels like going from horse-drawn carriage to race car. I love the convenient camera access pouch, so I can swing it off one shoulder and grab my camera while I’m hiking. It’s got plenty of space for other stuff. Check out their other bags as well.
Deep Dive on Solving Complexity
Problems can be divided into three classes: simple, complicated, and complex.
Simple things can be solved by anyone. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is simple.
Complicated things are intricate, and can be solved by a specialist with the right expertise. Flying an airplane is complicated. A complicated problem can be broken down into a series of steps that you produce a plan to surmount. Most problems in engineering are complicated.
Complex things are defined by the presence of numerous agents who interact with each other in ways that create unpredictable outcomes. A nation’s economy is complex. So are most business problems where you’ve got employees and customers - agents - who interact with each other.
What makes a system complex is not the presence of many agents, but the fact that these agents adapt to and interact with one another in a way that creates unpredictable consequences. Because the behavior of each agent is dependent on another, each agent’s action offers opportunities for further interactions, creating complex feedback loops that evade easy analysis. In complex systems, the behaviors of agents cannot be simply “summed” up, for the “whole is more than the sum.”
It’s important to know the difference between these classes of problems and which one you’re currently facing so that you mount the right response.
If you try to solve a simple problem through complexity you’ll waste resources.
If you try to solve a complex problem with a simple approach, you won’t be able to do it.
Since most important business problems fall into the complex realm, knowing how to solve them is also important for your leadership development. Bigger, more complex, problems require leaders who are capable of solving that level of complexity.
If you want to become a bigger leader, you’ll have to get good at this.
In today’s newsletter I’ll walk you through where people approach complexity wrong and what you should do instead.
Simplicity is on the other side of complexity
I bet you’ve had someone tell you to simplify. Focus on simplicity.
It’s good advice, generally!
People understand simple messages more than complex ones. So in marketing, for example, you get simple slogans: - Melt in your mouth, not in your hands (M&Ms) - Just do it (Nike) - The ultimate driving machine (BMW) - Red bull gives you wings (Red Bull)
What goes wrong is when business leaders demand simple approaches to complex problems.
This is where the headline for today’s newsletter about elephants comes in; you can’t take a complex problem and turn it into a collection of simple problems. Dividing an elephant in two doesn’t get you two small elephants. It gets you a mess.
The way I finally reconciled the importance of simplicity with the challenge of complexity is in this statement: Simplicity is on the other side of complexity.
That means you have to dive in, get your hands dirty, and understand the complex system you’re trying to affect. Then, and only then, can you come back and figure out a simple approach.
Simplicity comes from distilling a deep understanding of complexity. The problem is that most people are unwilling (or unable) to go through the complexity curve. So they sit on the simple side waiting for a solution to appear.
Are you ready to dive into the well of complexity?
Or, to comply with the boss’ request for simplicity, they propose a simple solution - but one that has no hope of solving the very real complexity of the problem.
Don’t be that person.
To paraphrase a famous quote from journalist and scholar H. L. Mencken: “To every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
You have to be able to get over the hump, see the simplicity by abstracting away all the noise, and then bring back what you’ve found. If you don’t engage with the problem and instead hunt around for a simple solution, you won’t find it.
You've got to get over the hump of complexity to get to effective simplicity. The red line is when you wander around instead of getting over the hump.
How to solve complexity
To solve complexity, tet me start by sharing the formulation from “Cracking Complexity,” which I agree with. To solve complexity:
The requisite variety of people who match the variety of perplexing challenges and seemingly unattainable opportunities... Can and must work together to collectively sense, absorb, think, decide, and act in order to ascend from data, information, and knowledge to shared understanding, wisdom, and execution... At a pace that matches the pace of those challenges and opportunities, leaping from current course and speed to a new course and speed without missing a beat.
Let me highlights some key points in there.
Requisite Variety You must match complexity with complexity. The more variety there is in the problem, the more variety you need in the solution.
In practice this means you need people with the right combination of skills, experience, and cognition in order to solve the problem at hand.
Decide and Act The team you bring together to solve a problem must have agency! They need to be able to make decisions and act on their own.
If the team constantly needs to check outside of themselves for approval - especially considering that those people outside the team won’t have shared understanding - they won’t get far.
Pace and Speed Speed is important. Complex systems can move faster than the team solving them. Employees, customers, the economy, and broader environment are all moving. If the team doesn’t have speed, they’ll stay one step behind.
Ascend from Data I really love data –> information –> knowledge –> wisdom pathway. It reflects how you can derive greater meaning out of data.
More and more data won’t solve complexity. You need to derive meaning from the data to provide direction.
Ascending to wisdom.
Now that we know at a high level how to solve complexity, I’ll share how people get this wrong in annual planning and subsequent execution.
This is so that you, dear reader, can be someone who understands complexity, uses the right approach, and gets things done!
How this shows up in annual planning and subsequent execution
The annual planning process is a ripe environment for practicing solving complexity, but there are few common ways in which people get this wrong.
Asking for more data Leaders will ask for a LOT of data to prepare to lock in OKRs for the annual plan. They do this looking for certainty. Unfortunately for them, there’s no certainty in solving complex problems.
You can ask for all the data in the world, and some of it may be helpful (see earlier discussion of data –> information –> knowledge –> wisdom), but most of the time more data isn’t what’s needed.
“In conversations, one of the most common ways people retreat from boldness or defer work/thinking is by calling for research: “We need to study and analyze this. We need to launch an investigation. We need more data!” Our response is (usually) to discourage recommendations that point to further research and instead ask the group to trust the tacit knowledge in the room and to guess what they’ll find after a few months of research. Then, we tell them to state the assumptions behind the guess and move on.”
(not having) Requisite variety The teams assigned to research a problem are often small. They may not have sufficient breadth of skills, experience, and cognition to tackle a problem of such complexity.
“It is known as Ashby’s Law or the Law of Requisite Variety: “Only variety destroys variety.” Complex challenges are high variety: Lots of moving parts, lots of dots to connect, lots of factors at play, lots of interconnections and compounding, many facets to be considered and implications to be taken into account. If you’re going to deal with all that at once, Ashby’s Law says you need to bring a matching amount of variety to the solving process.”
(not being willing to) Embrace emergence Complex problems can’t be solved in advance. There’s no plan that will tell you for sure that you’ll hit your desired goal.
In complexity, the only way out is through. You have to get started.
The inherent uncertainty in this approach is often unpalatable to leaders. They’re unwilling to sign off on moving forward without a “plan,” one where they’re confident it’ll hit the desired goal.
This is a specific example of trying to solve a complex problem with a complicated approach (remember, complicated problems are intricate and can be broken down into steps). This won’t work for complexity.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, Kevin, you have to have some sort of plan!”
That’s fine. You can have an initial approach, but don’t try to solve the whole thing in advance.
How many plans have you seen survive throughout a long program anyway? Don’t waste your time going into depth that’s not needed.
“The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path.”
(not getting enough heat to) Boil water Lastly, during execution, leaders often don’t sufficiently resource initiatives. Complex problems require energy and speed sufficient for the problem at hand.
Putting two people, or four people part time, is not enough to solve big problems. It’s like trying to boil water with your stove on low.
“Imagine that you put a pot of water on the stove and set the temperature to “low.” You wait for it to come to a boil. Five minutes. Ten minutes. After an hour, you begin to realize that it will never come to a boil. That is akin to how most people respond when they encounter a complex problem requiring thousands of high-quality collisions amongst a group of people with requisite variety, but instead choose to approach it as if it is only complicated: The metaphorical water never boils because you can’t generate the necessary energy or heat fast enough.”
When you have too many programs, it's like putting all your burners on low.
What should you do instead
Now that we know some of what not to do, here’s a few things that you should do instead.
Get Started When you’ve done this often enough, you’ll notice that the two months you spent planning would have been better spent doing.
Spending time planning without knowing enough about the problem won’t matter. And you have to get started in order to know enough about your problem anyway (remember the complexity curve?).
Just get started and make adjustments as you learn.
Embrace Emergence Fall in love with uncertainty. You can’t know in advance how to solve a complex problem, instead the solution will emerge after you’ve figured it out.
Importantly, when embracing emergence, you need tight cycles. You don’t want people dispersed for months before coming back to share information. You want to meet daily or weekly. Keep tight cycles.
“Complex challenges require innovative responses. These are the confounding head-scratchers with no right answers, only best attempts. There is no straight line to a solution, and you can only know that you’ve found an effective strategy in retrospect. Your complex challenges are never really solved; you grope your way forward and see how it goes.” - From “Cracking Complexity” by David Komlos and David Benjamin
Don’t Tell As the teams begin execution, your role as a leader is to architect an environment where they can be successful - not to tell them what to do.
Encourage momentum. If the team is moving in a direction and you think it’s wrong, have the humility to be open to being wrong. Let the team get started and see how they progress. It’s more important to develop agency in the team versus telling them how to act.
“The right way to prepare people for execution is to engage them in cocreating their way forward, not to have someone else tell them what they have to do.”
Think about the problems you’re facing at work; which ones are complicated, and which ones are complex?
If they’re complex, are you set up for success? Do you have a team of requisite variety? Is the team able to work together to collectively move up from data to wisdom? Do they have agency to act? Is speed high enough?
Depending on what you find in your assessment, begin to make adjustments.
As always, I love hearing what you’re up against. What kind of problems are you solving and how’s it going? Let me know if you have any questions on complexity. Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Have a great one!
Kevin 😀
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