Do not be trapped by simple stories

As human beings we like to explain developments in our lives by simple stories, with a beginning, a middle part, and an end, populated with heroes and villains. Based on the outcome of our stories in the past, we decide how our stories in the future will play out.

This is very dangerous because the reality is often much more complex than our simple stories suggest. Therefore, we should be careful with believing in our own simple stories. To quote an interviewee in ‘Immunity to change’ by Kegan & Lahey: ‘If you oversimplify in the face of complexity, you do enormous damage. You bring a sledgehammer to bear in circumstances where what’s needed is a scalpel or whatever’. Additionally, as Reeves et al argue in ‘Taming complexity’, complexity is not necessarily bad and can have a number of advantages for organizations. It even has the potential to prevent corporate scandals...