• Water is transparent, so to be adaptable, we need to promote and practice clarity in internal communications and actions. Keeping ambiguity to a minimun is one method of promoting clarity, and practicing honesty is a good way to practice.
• Water is physically cohesive, while being ultimately pliable. Think about it; put water in a jar, it conforms to the jar, pour it out, it follows gravity, and water surrounds whatever is submerged in it. Water moves as one, just as a group adaptability needs to be a key characteristic of any successful team. But in a larger sense, when one considers what I call the “bordering language” of synonyms, one discovers a greater depth to the concept of coherence, words like intelligence, comprehensibility, understandability, intelligibility, decipherability,  conncinity (my favorite),  unity, and harmony—just to name a few. Concinnity is a harmonious arrangement of things; where a culture is arranged and led in such a way as to promote and sustain harmony. My friend Ed H. has the best working definition for harmony that I’ve found. Ed derived his description from the novelist Douglas Adams and French impressionist painter Georges Seurat:

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Harmony is the marriage of the contrary and of the similar; marrying discordant elements, regardless of tone, of color, of line, of thought and of purpose…

• Water as described by Sun Tzu is fluid. Fluidity can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, fluidity implies adaptability, flexibility, fluency, smoothness, and ease. On the other, fluidity implies instability, unstableness, fickleness, inconstancy, changeableness, shifting, and flux. For cultures in a competitive environment, having the first form of fluidity is desired, while inflicting the second on the competitor. In addition, fluidity’s synonym fluency implies an eloquent and skillful use of language—or mediums of exchange. Fluency is possible only through practice, lots of practice. So much practice the skill becomes tacit knowledge, thus simple (effortless?)…even intuition.

Simplicity

Articulation in language and action are elements of simplicity. Simplicity implies tacit. As simple as the force of gravity directing water down a hill, going around and engulfing obstacles, thus is the potential of a group that has made their purpose/mission tacit and have the freedom to act. In fact, the sum of the skill sets may be so simple as to defy explanation—and more often than not in these cases, others learn by close association; watching, failing, learning, and making tacit those capabilities needed to cope and adapt. Boyd said as much in the abstract of Conceptual Spiral:

To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us, suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world.

“To make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need” implies the development and nurturing of habits that will enable us to adapt.That which is habitual becomes simple (and as mentioned above, yet another route to tacit).

Close

To the troops using the remote control vehicle mentioned above, the solution was obvious, and seemingly simple. Importantly, they were in a unit where they could act on their idea—and they did so outside the bureaucracy at little cost, and saved six lives (maybe more).

Taking a riff from the conference title, our leaders should be checking to make sure the rules of engagement (ROE) and other rigid rule sets aren’t implicitly making their folks hopelessly incapable of adaptability. As we increase adaptability, the more adaptability becomes a habit—and when it is a habit, it becomes simple. Just a thought.

Postscript:

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