Navigation is: how to identify our current position, determine our destination, and steer our ship towards it. The high art of navigation is the ability to get our bearings in unknown territory – that is, when we are faced with uncertain locations, moving targets and a variety of possible routes. The methods of navigation in the New World required principles of thought and rules of action in conditions of uncertainty and great complexity.

The New World is unknown to us in many respects. So what can we know nevertheless? Perhaps we know much more already than we are aware of. We know, for instance, that the new will be complex. Managing complexity will be the greatest challenge. This will be true for organizations of every kind: commercial enterprises and hospitals, public authorities and schools, cities and states. We know that all these organizations need to function in conditions of growing complexity; it is also true that this very complexity will enable them to function better and better, and in ever new ways.

These enable us to navigate through periods of change despite all the uncertainties we face. With each step we take we will learn more, for that is how complexity-compatible control methods with appriately designed feedback loops work.

The right strategy is to take advantage of complexity.

When naysayers abound, telling us what is not possible and what cannot be done, as is currently the case, this is always an indicator of profound change. What used to be right is suddenly wrong. Many will only see the old in the new, and steer their actions in the wrong direction. In times of change, that is a common pattern.

The greatest challenge of the New World is its ever-increasing complexity. Complexity is the main reason for the escalating number of local and global crises. Crises originate from outdated organizations incapable of mastering increased complexity. More and more organizations are overstrained, sluggish, inefficient, and paralyzed.

This incapacity results from poorly programmed navigation systems, from structures that originated from the previous century, from an outdated understanding of management, and from steering, directing, and shaping with obsolete methods and tools.

It is due to this incapacity that more and more organizations respond to the challenge with the wrong strategy. They attempt to reduce complexity so they can cling to their obsolete functions. To them, complexity is something entirely negative. This attitude keeps them from finding effective solutions, and further exacerbates the crisis.

The right strategy is to take advantage of complexity. It is the only strategy that creates solutions. Flexibility in responding to complexity is the raw material of intelligence, innovation and evolution, for self-regulation and self-organization, and for all major achievements. Complexity and differentiation are the materials from which the New World and its new organizations will be built. The success of the Great Transformation21 largely depends on our ability to profoundly reform the organizational fabric of our society and its management.

A sound knowledge of complexity, and the ways to master it, is a key resource of a well-functioning organization. Smart use of systems knowledge, feedback loops, and control mechanisms is more productive than redoubling our time and effort. Information on cybernetics (the science of control) will outrank money, and smart delegation to self-organized subunits will outrank power.

This is equally true for society as a whole. Its previous political categories, based on the polar opposites of capitalism and socialism, are outdated because in a society of complexity there is no one best way for everything. In their stead, we need a new integration of systems-functionism – as a compass for those navigating through times of proliferating confusion.

From disruption to new destinations – exploring new bearings

The transition from an Old World to a New World along the dimensions described here will lead to a fundamental shift of boundaries. Navigating in times of change also means looking beyond current boundaries and exploring new bearings and coordinates.

Transformational changes alter the limits of perception. They alter the categories in which we perceive limits and boundaries, the limits to the language we use to describe our perceptions, and the limits to thought and action. Changes like these also expand the limits of required performance, and those of possible performance. The same is always true for personal capabilities and the working style that determines these capabilities.

I have met many successful entrepreneurs and managers who had changed their working approach, and often even their life style, in the course of their lives; not necessarily because they had to but because they wanted to. It was one of their ways to transcend limits and set out for new shores. It was leadership on their own behalf.

You get to a limit – and you have to decide whether you will accept it or not. For a long time in our lives, perceived limits are limitations to our working approach and lifestyle, but they are far from being the actual limits to our performance capabilities.

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