Chris Preece
Founder of Omnicomplexity. Author of Omnicomplexity: Leadership in Complex Organisations.
For two decades Chris Preece has been the person brought in when an organisation's structure starts fighting the work it exists to do. That work has run from a global research-and-development corporation, financial services, private assets, pharmaceuticals and travel to national government programmes and the blue-light services, where a badly chosen constraint on a fire crew's screen can cost a life. He sits on doctoral vivas as an industry expert, examining research against whether it survives contact with real work.
Across the public and private sectors
The through-line in Chris’s career is range. He began in fast-growing software and web startups and rose into leadership, then spent the years since moving between worlds that rarely share a language: a global research-and-development corporation, financial services and private assets, pharmaceuticals, travel, national government programmes, and the blue-light services. Sitting on doctoral vivas as an industry expert, he tests academic research against the only standard that finally matters, which is whether it survives contact with real work.
One story stands for many. Leading the small team that built the command-and-control software UK fire crews depend on, Chris sent a junior colleague out on a fire engine. The crew, in heavy protective gloves, could not reliably hit the small on-screen buttons the software relied on. Nobody working from a desk had known. The team redesigned the screens around how the work was actually done, and it is a lesson that has held in every sector since.
You cannot understand how something will be used until you watch the people who use it do their jobs.
The same instinct is what let one of the world’s oldest national registries rebuild its entire way of working in three weeks when it lost the old one overnight. Not a plan handed down from above, but many small moves by the people doing the work, under conditions that changed for everyone at once. Chris was one of the people inside it.
How he works
One idea runs through all of it. The value in an organisation lives between people, in how they work together; it is rarely found inside any one individual. You cannot manage that from a distance: to change how the work runs, you have to be inside it. So Chris works from inside the organisation, one live problem at a time, moving the decision closer to the people who can see the work and setting conditions so the improvement keeps running on its own.
Two habits come with that. Before an engagement, Chris will tell you what would prove the approach wrong. And on the first call, he will tell you if he thinks you do not need him.
Omnicomplexity Ltd
A UK consultancy, registered in London, working with leaders in complex organisations across the public and private sectors. The name reflects how Chris sees the work: complexity is a permanent feature of a large organisation, not a phase it will grow out of. The firms around you are still paying to reduce it. This one starts from the opposite bet, that the complexity is the advantage you keep paying to destroy, and the job is to put it to work.