SYSTEMS THINKING AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: A PERSPECTIVE

Organizational development “refers to the context, focus and purpose of the change while developing an organization.” Additionally, one recent definition of organizational development states: “Organizational development is a critical and science-based process that helps organizations build their capacity to change and achieve greater effectiveness by developing, improving, and reinforcing strategies, structures, and processes.” In essence, good organizational change and development require a systems-thinking mindset and an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to tackling complex organizational challenges.

Systems Thinking has been gaining significant interest lately as a comprehensive approach to introducing organizational change and development. Through systems thinking, a number of core concepts and practical tools can be applied to better understand the complexity of each organization. There are many competing definitions of systems thinking in the academic literature. As Ross D. Arnold and Jon P. Wade point out in their recent article, “Systems thinking is, literally, a system of thinking about systems.”

Analytical/ Linear Thinking Vs Systems Thinking

The Parts Of A System

Systems are made up of three parts: elements, interconnections, and a function or a purpose. The word “function” is used when talking about a non-human system, and the word “purpose” is used for human systems. The elements are the actors in the system. In our circulatory system, the elements are our heart, lungs, blood, blood vessels, arteries, and veins. They do the work. The interconnections would be the physical flow of blood, oxygen, and other vital nutrients through our body. The function of the circulatory system is to allow blood, oxygen and other gases, nutrients, and hormones to flow through the body to reach all of our cells.

An Example – The School (or) An Educational Institution

A school is a system, with the elements represented by teachers, students, principals, custodians, secretaries, bus drivers, cooks, parents, and counsellors. The interconnections are the relationships between the elements, the school rules, the schedule, and the communications between all of the people in the school. The purpose of a school is to prepare the students for a successful future and to help them reach their full potential.

Unfortunately, some unintended behaviours can occur as a result of Organizational Change when the Systemic interplay is ignored. Consider the purposes of the actors in this system:

In this system, the high-stakes nature of the tests cause school districts to put a lot of pressure on their teachers to teach to the test and base their evaluations on their test scores. Teachers feel the need to compete with one another to earn the highest scores, as well as gain job security and an increased salary, so they no longer share ideas with one another and they may even cheat when administering the tests. Students feel a lot of pressure to earn high enough scores to be promoted to the next grade or avoid remedial classes, so they may cheat on the test.

A government may profess that educating children is a high priority, but if it slashes education funding, then clearly educating children is not a primary purpose of that government. This was not the intention of putting these tests into schools, and everyone agrees that those results are awful. Unfortunately, if the sub-purposes and the overarching system purpose are not aligned and coexisting peacefully, a system can’t function successfully.

The Most Important Part of a System

Perhaps the easiest way to examine how a system’s elements, interconnections, and purposes compare in terms of importance within a system is to speculate how the system would be impacted if each component was changed one at a time.

The least impact on a system is usually felt when its elements are changed. While certain elements may be very important to the system, by and large, if the elements are changed, the system can still continue to exist in a similar form and work to achieve its purpose or function. In a school, teachers, administrators, and other employees may leave, transfer, or retire. Students move away or may enter higher grade levels beyond the school. The elements may change, but the school is still easily identified as a school, and it still has largely the same objectives and sense of purpose.

Changing the interconnections of a system is quite different. If the interconnections change, the system will be impacted significantly. It may no longer be recognizable, even if the elements remain in place. Putting the students in charge instead of the adults in a school setting would undoubtedly change that system dramatically.

Changing a system’s function or purpose also greatly impacts the entire system and may render it unrecognizable. If the school’s main purpose is no longer educating children, but is now to make money by recruiting students to charge tuition, obviously the system is dramatically changed.

Every component of the system is essential. Elements, interconnections, and the purpose or function all interact with each other and each one plays a vital role in the system. The purpose or function of a system is often the least noticeable, but it definitely sets how the system will behave. Interconnections are the relationships within the system. When they are changed, the behaviour of the system is also usually altered. The elements are typically the most visible parts of a system, but are often the least likely to cause a significant change in the system unless changing an element impacts the purpose or interconnections as well. Each part of the system is equally important as they work hand in hand, but changing a system’s purpose has the greatest impact on the system as a whole.

Six Themes Of Systems Thinking

Interconnectedness and synthesis relate to the dynamic relationships between various parts of a whole, the process of obtaining expected synergies between parts of the company. This includes the idea of circularity, which stresses the requirement of a mindset shift from linear to circular. Similarly, the concept of emergence relates to the outcomes of synergies that can come about as the elements of a system interact with each other in nonlinear ways. In the workplace, this often takes the form of the push and pull that happens due to organizational politics and competing priorities. Organizational leaders with a systems-thinking mindset will see this as an opportunity for enhanced collaborations and innovation.

Balancing and reinforcing feedback loops within an organization serve as guidance for making adjustments as we learn more about the interconnectedness of the elements of the system and their outcomes. Additionally, causality refers to the flows of influence between the many interconnected parts within a system. As we better understand the casualty and directionality of these elements, we will have an improved perspective on the many fundamental parts of the system, including relationships and feedback loops.

In the workplace, a skilled systems-thinking leader will ensure that mechanisms for multiple feedback loops are established and effectively communicated to their employees. Furthermore, they will understand correlation versus causation as they use the data gathered from the feedback loops to enhance workplace practices. Finally, systems mapping is a tool that systems thinkers can use to identify and visually map out the many interrelated elements of a complex system, which will help them develop interventions, shifts, or policy decisions that will dramatically change the system in the most effective way.

Ten Enemies of Systems Thinking

Some common thinking statements which act as obstacles to systems thinking may be:

Systems thinking does not come easily to everyone. Many find systems thinking to be a bit unstructured and unorganized when they first begin to look at the world through this lens. It may be overwhelming and uncomfortable at first because they become concerned about taking action when they don’t know the effect that their suggested solution may have on the system and its parts. Rest assured that this feeling is perfectly normal and will begin to ease over time as we reach deeper levels of understanding into the way systems behave.

The ultimate gain is the ability of organizations to be responsive to the changes in ecosystems and to be prepared to fine-tune and adapt parts of their organization on the fly. With this understanding, systems’ thinking provides clear benefits to organizations. It shows alternative directions for improvement with respect to the company’s inner and outer connections. It gives a significant advantage in increasing the organization’s capacity for change and, as a consequence, to fulfill the vision of business sustainability.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

ENTROPY: BEHAVIORS THAT IMPACT OUR LIVES

Murphy’s Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that? Murphy’s Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody’s life: Entropy.

What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?
One simple way to think about it could be: Imagine that we take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens. Why? Quite simply because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are a nearly infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if we build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like our sandcastle. Meanwhile, there are a nearly infinite number of combinations that don’t look like it. Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of our sandcastle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.

These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

How does Entropy Connect to Our Lives?
The important thing about entropy: it always increases over time.It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode, and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.

In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.The Key: Without Effort, Life Tends to Lose Order.

We can fight back against the pull of entropy. We can solve a scattered puzzle, pull the weeds out of the garden, clean a messy room, or, importantly, organize individuals into a cohesive team.But because the universe naturally slides toward disorder, we have to expend energy to create stability, structure, and simplicity.Successful relationships require care and attention, just as successful houses require cleaning and maintenance. Successful teams require communication and collaboration. Without effort, things will decay.

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. This insight—that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can counteract that tendency by expending energy—reveals the core purpose of life. We must exert effort to create useful types of order that are resilient enough to withstand the unrelenting pull of entropy.

Entropy will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to add energy. Order requires effort.

Entropy in Daily Life

Entropy helps explain many of the mysteries and experiences of daily life. Here are some just to help understand its play in our lives.

Consider the human body.The collection of atoms that make up our body could be arranged in a virtually infinite number of ways and nearly all of them lead to no form of life whatsoever. Mathematically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly against our very presence. We are a very unlikely combination of atoms. And yet, here we are. In a universe where entropy rules the day, the presence of life with such organization, structure, and stability is stunning.

Why Art is Beautiful. Entropy offers a good explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically pleasing. Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.Beauty is rare and unlikely in a universe of disorder.

Why Marriage is Difficult. One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. He writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”There are many ways a marriage can fail—financial stress, parenting issues, crazy in-laws, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, infidelity, and so on. A deficiency in any one of these areas can wreck a family.To be happy, however, we need some degree of success in each major area. Thus, all happy families are alike because they all have a similar structure. Disorder can occur in many ways, but order, in only a few.

Therefore: Optimal Lives Are Designed Not Discovered.
We all have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are specific to us. But we also live in a larger society and culture that were not designed with our specific abilities in mind. Given what we know about entropy, what could the odds be of the environment we happen to grow up in is also the optimal environment for our talents?It is very unlikely that life is going to present us with a situation that perfectly matches our strengths. Out of all the possible scenarios we could encounter, it is far more likely that we will encounter one that does not cater to our talents.

Evolutionary biologists use a term called “mismatch conditions” to describe when an organism is not well-suited for a condition it is facing. We have common phrases for mismatch conditions: “like a fish out of water” or “bring a knife to a gunfight.” Obviously, when you are in a mismatch condition, it is more difficult to succeed, to be useful, and to win.It is likely that life will not be optimal—mismatch conditions may exist. Maybe we didnot grow up in the optimal culture for our interests, maybe we were exposed to the wrong subject or sport, maybe we were born at the wrong time in history. It is far more likely that we are living in a mismatch condition than in a well-matched one.Knowing this, wecan take it upon ourselves to design our ideal lifestyle. Wehave to turn a mismatch condition into a well-matched one. Optimal lives are designed, not discovered.

Finally, returning to Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against us. It is simply entropy at work. It is nobody’s fault that life has problems. There are many disordered states and few ordered ones. Given the odds against us, what is remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we can solve them at all.

A closed system is one that is not taking in any energy from the outside. In other words, unless we add outside energy to keep things orderly, the natural trend of any closed system is to become more disordered. We will never be able to reverse entropy in the long run. Billions of years from now, every atom in the universe will be scattered and spread out such that entropy is maximized and nothing is orderly. But in the short run, we can create local pockets of order within our lives.The Second Law (of thermodynamics) defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. 
Another related insight here as we conclude is that we should probably quit things faster than we do. There is always a risk that we will quit too early, but of all the possible things we could be exposed to and invested in, it is very unlikely that we are currently engaged in the best thing for us. Thus, if results are not coming easily, move on.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.