This is the third and final post in a series on how leaders can effectively navigate the complexity of today’s business world for their organizations. Read the previous post here.

In my first post on complexity, I referenced the Cynefin Framework and how it distinguishes between complicated situations (like launching a rocket into space) and complex situations (like raising my teenage daughter). And my second post just scratched the surface of polarities and paradox. A key concept of complexity that underpins both posts is the idea of emergence—an impressive word for “we don’t really know what’s going to happen until we see it start to happen.”

Emergence as the New Normal

Take a National Football League game in the U.S.—a great illustration of emergence. In the average game, both teams combined run about 130 plays. It is impossible for a team to predict how many plays they will get to run during a game, let alone map out the order of the plays the team will execute. The coaching staff comes into the game with a set of ideas about the opposing team’s strengths and weaknesses, a set of strategies they think will work, and a well-rehearsed playbook. And then, they embark on a 60-minute, play-by-play experiment—seeing what’s working and exploiting it, seeing what doesn’t and avoiding it, and allowing the game to unfold.

NFL coaches are not just experts at football. They also have a highly developed capacity for working in an environment of emergence—seeing the system and how it is operating, aligning the team around a changing strategy, and conducting real-time experiments to advance to a win.

Now contrast this with what we’ve taught leaders for years about things like developing three-year strategies, building annual plans and budgets months before the fiscal year starts, and implementing large-scale changes. Our historical approach to these management practices is rooted in an unspoken assumption: If you’re an effective leader, you should be able to predict the future. But more and more, we see the paint chipping off this kind of thinking, revealing the unavoidable truth underneath. We ask leaders to manage in a way that is fundamentally out of sync with a complex world where, like NFL football, the game can change with every play.

Embracing Emergence Through Experiments

But that doesn’t mean we can’t plan. What it does mean is that we ask leaders to experiment—to test the ideas in their plans, to learn from the tests, and to adapt to what they learn. And keep on testing. Experiments can be highly structured and formal for important changes and decisions, and they can be part of a mindset that is used for day-to-day decision-making.

For example, the Harvard Business Review article “The Discipline of Business Experimentation” describes an approach for conducting effective experiments. In one example, the retail chain Kohl’s conducted an experiment across 100 stores to learn if they could open an hour later with no appreciable reduction in store revenue (it turns out they could). In another experiment, they tested a pet project of several executives—selling furniture—to see if it could increase revenue (it actually reduced revenue because of the amount of retail floor space it consumed).

“Failure” is Good

One final point: A key part of making the shift from rigid planning to experimentation is creating an environment where people see the failure of an experiment as a good thing. An experiment is not a “pilot” to test the implementation of an idea we’ve already decided to implement. It is a learning exercise to test the idea itself. So the outcome is learning, which is useful whether the experiment fails or succeeds. Building a safe environment for experimentation means creating safe-to-fail experiments and rewarding teams for the learnings from experiments instead of the results.

So here’s a way learning leaders can model this new world of emergence and experimentation. If you are implementing action learning projects or other types of on-the-job experiences in your leadership development work, how about having your leaders run experiments instead of implementing projects?

In these three posts, we’ve just begun to poke around the edges of the topic of complexity. My hope is that we as learning leaders can begin a broader dialogue on complexity and help each other go deeper into this rich topic.

What other aspects of complexity should we explore to help your leaders better navigate today’s business world?