Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problems

I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what you’re going to get for your money. It’s what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.

But it only works when you are really certain that the thing you’re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes you’re seeking.

Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.

Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.

To illustrate - a desired outcome: the local population of children to receive the education they need to realise their potential and live productive and fulfilling lives.

Such an outcome would be the product of many different cumulative actions taken over an extended period of time, and by a range of local people, families and communities. If they can work together, truly understand the needs of local children, learn what works and doesn’t work best in their context, and evolve the nature of the education and support they provide the kids during their childhood and adolescence, then they’ve a chance of achieving it.

But if you need certainty in what it is that will be delivered, then you’ll start to seriously compromise your ability to achieve your outcome.

For instance, maybe politicians shift the outcome from “children becoming adults with happy and fulfilled lives” to an output: “children perform better in exams than in comparable countries”. It’s widely adopted as a proxy for what is admittedly a hard-to-measure outcome - but it distorts the incentives in the system and, to the extent that children are taught to pass the exam, rather than prepared for life or helped to discover their talents, it gets in the way.

Further, sometimes outputs like these aren’t specific enough. Yes, you’ll secure those A grades for the school - but how? What are taxpayers getting for their money? Organisations’ commercial teams want to know what’s in the gantt chart, what the deliverables will be, so that you and they can demonstrate active management of delivery. Commissioning teams often start with a solution they believe will deliver the desired outcomes, and just work back from there, listing out their requirements with spurious accuracy and utterly hubristic confidence. “Happy and fulfilled lives” as an outcome is substituted for activities (# lessons teaching of this particular curriculum over a period of time), or even inputs (a qualified teacher and a classroom for 30 children).

This isn’t a blog post about education (it’s way too reductive for that, my apologies to those pained).

It’s about how we inadvertently hinder our efforts to achieve big ambitious outcomes when we demand predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problems.

Your theory of change will be wrong. If you write your procurement document according to your first theory of change, and you buy something over-specified and unable to evolve with what you learn, then you will buy the wrong thing. If you produce your business case to get the money to work towards an outcome, and you inextricably commit yourself to delivering your straw man, you will be getting funding and permission to deliver the wrong thing. You need to move to a more adaptive approach - one that can evolve with what you’re learning empirically about what works.

Instead of overcommitting to specific solutions up front, invest in the capability to evolve your solutions over time. It requires boldness, a willing to recognise the uncertainty (which was always there, but is usually ignored or obscured). It means starting small, testing and learning and adapting as you go, evolving your theory of change, systematically testing your riskiest assumptions. It’s better for your organisation: the risks you’re taking are smaller, the mistakes you make will cost less, and you’ll be more frequently validating and revising your business case - and so will be much more intensely focused on realising the most valuable opportunities for impact, wherever they lie, rather than delivering things simply because you initially promised to do so.

If you’re truly committed to realising your ambitious outcomes, you need to loosen your grip on how they’re to be delivered. You can’t hold them both tightly.