I recently became aware of the term ‘complexity debt’ in an article from the Kellogg School of Management. It is a simple concept of particular value to those with a financial background – a group which will apparently exceed those pursuing law degrees in the future.

It can be seen as the debt that is owed and must be paid by those who must navigate complexity to execute an activity that is complex. Some of the complexity is unavoidable, but much is built in over time. In its simplest interpretation, the currency of such debt is the time to complete the activity and achieve the desired goal – and time is money, which impacts budget allocations. Working through the maze of complexity like a good soldier routinely means delivering late to need and over budget, which damages credibility.  However, failure to pay that debt – to take shortcuts – often creates barriers at every institutional corner, wasting more and more time until once again the credibility of the executor is in question.

The obvious answer in any organization is to keep it simple, the KISS principle. That works well in simple activities with a high degree of certainty, few stakeholders and few risks. Of course that is no longer reality in getting big things done, my ‘big things’ of interest being weapon system platform acquisitions. But it is equally applicable to the early regulatory initiatives and policies of the fledgling government in Canada.

Effective democracies have strong accountability to their citizens, and as such have complex processes touching a myriad of stakeholders to launch big initiatives. This complexity debt grows through the years as mistakes are made, processes are created or grown in size to attempt to guard against repeats, and often new agents are added to the layers of review requirements. Only then does a contract occur which it is hoped is a deal with good and competent people in industry to deliver the defined outcome. But as Warren Buffet has said and despite all the contractual protections one puts in place, “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person” – the complexity of salvaging or extracting from a contract gone bad introduce a whole new scale of complexity debt. And of course, complexity goes up several notches once in contract.

Therefore one can easily conclude that complexity debt is baked in and unavoidable – it is the ever-present risk to every project and timely delivery. We often say that with foresight, we would start projects earlier to ensure they deliver on time by allowing generous amounts of time to address complexity, but that assumes we know enough about the future to get the requirements definition right, something very unlikely given the astonishing speed of technological advances today and particularly in sensors and weapon systems.

In Canada’s military platform acquisitions domain, credibility has evaporated. We all know process reengineering along with a new Defence Procurement Agency is intended by the new government. The new organization can set a new culture of risk acceptance to replace aversion on steroids and the related ferocious blame game. But many other government stakeholders will still interface with the new Agency and bring complexity to each weapons systems platform acquisition project.

So what should one do? Busy people have no time to read long papers, so I will offer only a few suggestions.

The first is to adopt a servant leadership style of support to those required to navigate the complexity debt that will always exist in democratic governments and in the weapons systems platform acquisition projects themselves.

The second is to set expectations properly at project launch and in a transparent manner. As one example of a change that would better reflect reality, until the first platform is delivered and tested, the work involved should be termed the Initial Project Proposal. Once facts exist, the Project Closing Mandate should be created.

The third I have drawn from an approach developed in the 1990s for a Life Cycle Mangers Guide within National Defence Headquarters. In this guide and for every activity, it established the very minimum “though must” protocol, and then listed a myriad of “additional considerations”. Stakeholder reviewers could question why some considerations were not proposed but not mandate them. If one considers financial loans that lead to debt, borrowers can insure their loan, decide on an affordable repayment terms, and make lump sum payments annually to advance loan retirement – all related considerations that are not mandatory. Such an approach in organizational review and approvals and within the complex platform projects themselves could reduce complexity debt dramatically.

And the final one I have previously addressed in multiple papers, the serious implementation of sustained collaboration that is actually operationalized on a foundation of joint working across all aspects of the complex weapons platform project ecosystem, and especially across the contract divide. Among a myriad of other benefits, it can do a lotto minimize the potential damage if the Prime contractor is one of those ‘bad people’ Warren Buffet referred to. Over the years, I have learned that complexity debt is ‘a thing’. All attempts to date to tame this beast have regularly led to band aid solutions or more debt, not less. Until such time as drastic action is taken and significantly more risk is taken, nothing will change. The owners of policy in government would do well to seriously scale back their expectations and promises to the public they serve.  And the first big risk will come from then significant pivot penalty involved, but this time the penalty should be celebrated.