When we are going to do something we have done before, we know what we don't know.
We know where and why delays are likely to occur and we usually know what to do if something goes wrong. We can plan the steps ahead. In this world, clarity and process optimization is good.
Wicked or complex problems on the other hand are different. There is no one right answer. There are no agreement on what the problem really is.
You face many stakeholders with conflicting objectives. No solutions are right or wrong. You can make the outcome better or worse, but you are never done. Forcing clarity in this world will inevitably hinder innovation.
Getting married is not complex, but having a happy marriage is. There is a manual for getting married. But there is no "best practice" for a happy marriage. It's the sum of many small parts which makes it difficult to make a detailed plan. You cannot copy someone else's work and expect the same results because no two complex problems are alike.
All the analysis, plans and methodologies used to build a car are useless if your problem is car traffic. A car slowing down will cause ripple effects in the traffic difficult to predict. The issue with traffic is not the cars, the buses, the bicycles, or the pedestrians. It is in the relationship between them.
Building the Titanic out of LEGO bricks is not complex. You can simply follow the instructions. The whole equals the sum of the parts.
What about development of digital products that you haven't built before, either at all or in your context?
Market conditions change. Technology is changing. People's behavior change. We don't quite know how we are going to do it. We don't know what people want. You don't know what you don't know until you do something and get feedback. That's when the actual development starts.
Leading in complexity calls for something other than plans and best practices. Sense what's happening. Get some data. Take small actions based on the data and see what happens. Learn from it. Do more of what works, and less of what don't. Find the small changes that have a large positive effect.
Easier said then done. We are humans and we fear uncertainty. When we face uncertainty, we often manufacture excuses for not getting started. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work.
It's hard to say to your stakeholders that you don't know exactly if it will be a success, when it will be finished and what it will cost.
What we can do is to deliver something early and often and let people try it and give feedback.
We can also share what we believe (our hypothesis), what we will do to verify it, how we will measure it, what we observed, what we learned from it and what we will do next based on that.
In complexity, how do you measure success? You get what you measure you know ...
