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Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010
Thinking through Complexity,
Managing for Uncertainty
Lam Chuan Leong
Finally, in the Crisis quadrant, we
are faced with matters that are highly
complex, unpredictable and which give
us little time to react. This calls for
another style of management thinking
and intervention aimed at restoring the
situation to one that is more manageable:
that is, one of the other three quadrants.
Since our interest is how best to
operate in a complex and uncertain
environment, we will focus our analysis
on the Management quadrant.
MANAGING COMPLEXITY IN
GOVERNANCE
If we apply this matrix to Singapore,
we can describe the issues we faced
from the 1960s to the 1980s as falling
into a relatively simple set, which
can be satisfactorily resolved by the
application of the rational method. The
characteristic problems of that time
were quite straightforward—to build
excellent infrastructure, schools and
housing, and to create jobs. As Singapore
evolves from a third-world to a first-world
economy, there is a corresponding
rise in the complexity of our problems.
Issues such as a declining and ageing
population, climate change and rising
healthcare costs do not have obvious
or straightforward answers. Greater
calls for consultation, participation and
variation from Singaporeans today can
be seen as both symptom and cause of
the complexity of our environment. The
types of problems can be positioned on
the time-complexity matrix as shown in
Figure 3.
The strength of the Singapore Civil
Service is, arguably, in the technical
quadrant. Simple environments are
generally amenable to what are
essentially engineering solutions—
solutions which depend on repeatable
causes and effects (or at most on
probabilistic or stochastic models).
The problems of the 1960s to 1980s in
Singapore fall into this quadrant.
However, many of our most pressing
policy problems now fall in the top
right quadrant, in the context of
management. Take climate change,
for example: governments have to juggle the competing concerns of
environmental sustainability, economic
competitiveness and national welfare
to arrive at the most appropriate policy
responses for their country—there are
few certainties and no right answers.
We have to make sense of the problem
by probing, experimenting, creating
environments conducive to the generation
of new ideas and new interactions,
and responding to emerging patterns
and behaviours.
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