驯服复杂性

In business, complexity gets bad press. That’s not surprising. It can be cognitively demanding to understand how a system or organization made up of many very different interconnected elements actually works. But the fact that such systems or organizations are difficult to understand doesn’t make them inherently bad. In addition to its more obvious costs, complexity confers critical benefits, especially in dynamic and uncertain environments. In the following pages we draw on our experience and perspectives in business, biology, and physics to offer some reflections on the nature, benefits, and costs of complexity and provide some guidance on managing it in business organizations.

在商业中，复杂性得到了坏消息。这并不令人惊讶。要理解一个由许多非常不同的相互关联的元素组成的系统或组织的实际运作情况，在认知上会有很大的要求。但是，这种系统或组织难以理解的事实并不意味着它们本身就是坏的。除了更明显的成本之外，复杂性还带来了重要的好处，特别是在动态和不确定的环境中。在下面的篇幅中，我们借鉴了我们在商业、生物学和物理学方面的经验和观点，对复杂性的性质、好处和成本进行了一些思考，并对商业组织的管理提供了一些指导。

What Is Complexity—and What Is It Good For?

什么是复杂性--它有什么好处？

“Complexity” is one of the most frequently used terms in business but also one of the most ambiguous. Even in the sciences it has numerous definitions. For our purposes, we’ll define it as a large number of different elements (such as specific technologies, raw materials, products, people, and organizational units) that have many different connections to one another. Both qualities can be a source of advantage or disadvantage, depending on how they’re managed.

"复杂性 "是商业中最经常使用的术语之一，但也是最模糊的术语之一。即使在科学领域，它也有许多定义。为了我们的目的，我们将它定义为大量不同的元素（如特定的技术、原材料、产品、人员和组织单位），它们彼此之间有许多不同的联系。这两种品质都可以成为优势或劣势的来源，取决于如何管理它们。

Let’s look at their strengths. To begin with, having many different elements increases the resilience of a system. A company that relies on just a few technologies, products, and processes—or that is staffed with people who have very similar backgrounds and perspectives—doesn’t have many ways to react to unforeseen opportunities and threats. What’s more, the redundancy and duplication that also characterize complex systems typically give them more buffering capacity and fall...