Obama and Complexity

So I was listening to a story on Public Radio last night… [Sorry, no link].

A journalist was talking about how he got to spend a month at the White House, hanging out with Obama. I’m guessing he write a book about it, so he was on the radio promoting it…

Obama was telling the journalist how much more “fast” the job of President is becoming.

To paraphrase Obama, if something went down in Africa say, in Lincoln’s time, the President might not react to it at all, and if he did, he might take a couple of months to get around it.

Nowadays, if something goes down in Africa (Say, the current Algerian crisis) the President is lucky if he has half an hour to make a decision.

And what’s true for Obama is also true of your job.

The world is getting faster and more complex by the hour, way faster than any of us were programmed to cope with.

Managing increasing hyper-complexity is going to be the most sought after and valued leadership skill there is. Computers can only do so much.

I fnd it quite exciting. Scary, but exciting…