Day 2 of “7 Days to Systems-Thinking”: Purpose and Complexity
A link to the complete 7-day series on systems thinking is here …
Systems Thinking 101: The Magic of Systems Thinking
Yesterday we talked about what a system is, and looked at the things that make up systems … the elements, the interconnections and inter-relationships, and “emergence”.
We also talked about how each of the elements can contain other elements, and how the inter-relationships and inter-connections “hold” the system together and, together with the various elements, might produce something that is not present in any of the elements themselves … the emergent property.
System Purpose
This is a good time to talk about purpose.
What is emergent from a system is not necessarily the same as what we intended.
Think about that for a while. What this means is that our declared intentions for the system have nothing to do with what the system actually does.
So, if your organisation is constantly declaring that “our people are our greatest asset” but actually do nothing to demonstrate this (and absenteeism and staff turnover may be as high as ever, whilst training and development opportunities may continue to be extremely limited. for example)… then what you are hearing in that “declaration” is merely a pipe dream.
Stafford Beer summed this up with his statement that “the purpose of a system is what it does”. Again, think about that statement because that has lots of powerful implications.
The purpose of a system has nothing to do with rhetoric, and everything to do with bahaviour.
Going back to elements for a minute. Consider what happens when you have one element nested within another (say a business unit within a division). The purpose of the business unit will be operating within the division, and may be either in harmony or in conflict with the purpose of the division.
Complexity Over Time
When we consider the various combinations of interaction of elements, interrelationships and interconnections … there’s quite a lot going on isn’t there?
All of this complexity is, as mentioned yesterday, unfolding over time. There are also different kinds of complexity. There is detail complexity if there are lots of different elements. There is dynamic complexity if there are a large number of connections between the elements where each element could have a number of different states.
So how do you know what effect change an element, or a relationship or a purpose is going to have? Whilst the answer is quite possibly (and rather unhelpfully) “an infinite number”, there are certain guidelines and principles that are useful to bear in mind when we consider possible changes to system and the effect this might have…
- Changing an element of a system will always have side effects.
- Changing an interconnection is likely to have a disproportionate effect compared to change a part of an element.
- Changing the purpose of a system (for example changing the purpose of a business from “making money” to “making people happy”) is likely to change the system significantly.
- Removing elements or parts of a system (for example, removing the Research and Development function form a Pharmaceutical company) would have a significant impact on the performance of the whole system.
- In the same way, altering the relationship of elements in the system (so a set of parts is first polished and then soldered and then bolted to another part, for example) can have a significant impact, such that the nature of the system itself is radically altered.
- Generally, there is a time delay between cause and effect in systems.
We are now beginning to establish relationships between structure of a system and its behaviour.
We’ll explore this a little more tomorrow (Day 3 of 7), when we talk about how the behaviour of a system can be affected and altered over time by something called “feedback”.
The concept of feedback will take us closer to the heart of systems-thinking, where we can begin to examine issues properly for the first time. This will allow us to, for example, explore the root causes of problems and uncover previously “hidden” or often neglected opportunities for change etc.
Day 3 of this 7-day series is here …
http://www.watt-works.com/systems-thinking/day-3-of-7-days-to-systems-thinking-stocks-flows-and-feedback-loops/
Tags: behaviour, complexity, detail complexity, dynamic complexity, feedback, purpose, Stafford Beer
Share