It’s not a behavioural problem: it’s the system

What we need if we want organisational transformation, if we want more effective organisations, if we want people to find the work they do meaningful: we need to work with the whole system. A buddy of mine in England recently observed that most people seem uninterested in effectiveness. Sad but true, I fear. Still desperately clinging on to “scientific” management mythologies, many folks just seem to want the numbers to add up and people to do what they’re told. A scary prospect if your business has just appointed a new global CEO who is a bean-counter by background and disposition and whose single-minded purpose is to show the shareholders that they are getting richer every quarter. Calling a performance issue a “behavioural problem” comes out of a mechanistic worldview. Yuck.

quantum shifting

Don’t ask a systems thinker for advice on managing performance or staff engagement.  They will probably say something pretty fruity and you’ll wind up frustrated by how fervently they trash conventional wisdom on the subject.  Of course performance, engagement, recruitment, they’re all connected, so your systems thinking friend will sound like a fruit loop because they’ll see the whole picture and proceed to suggest that you are asking the wrong questions, when all you wanted to know is “how to get people to do stuff”.  You go to them as a sounding board because there is something you like about the way they think; when you’ve talked previously, they come up with ideas that seem counter-intuitive at first, but are actually surprisingly on the money.  However, when it comes to a sticky situation you are actually dealing with, you don’t want to hear them bang on about the system, the…

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Quantitative Complexity Management: A simple 5 step process

There are plenty of self-anointed subject matter experts happy to pontificate upon complexity. Sources, causes and their own approach to solutions but what they all (except Ontonix) lack is the means to establish a sound (verifiable) quantitative basis from which to commence the process of ‘complexity management’, monitoring and maintenance.

Check it out, for FREE, on-line!:

The following five-step process forms the backbone of all our service engagements. It reflects our extensive experience in Quantitative Complexity Management in a multitude of applications spanning a wide variety of industrial sectors. It also illustrates the typical structure and workflow in a business simplification and ‘robustification’ project.

via Ontonix – Complex Systems Management, Business Risk Management.

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• Complexity:: Strategy and the ‘threatened’ business model
• The 7 Element OEM System: Breaking the Viscious Complexity Cycle
• Complexity, risk, uncertainty and change

Innovation:: managing complexity & reducing risk [Design News]

I was first aware of the author courtesy of this quote…that alarmingly few business ‘leaders’ appear to, either, believe or understand…

“In a complex system, learning how all the pieces—constant and variable—interact gives a depth of understanding that averts catastrophe. That is what we mean by human-centred design—understanding the interfaces among technology, people, communities, governments, and nature. This is what makes complexity manageable”.

If you are in the business of making money based upon the ability of another party to avoid financial loss, then your own ability to identify the properties that distinguish ‘good risk from bad’ is, SURELY, fundamental!? So the message that there is a means to gain “…understanding that averts catastrophe“, through “understanding the interfaces among technology, people, communities, governments, and nature” must surely be greeted with wide-eyed enthusiasm.

Complexity, risk, uncertainty and change

Business management, particularly for those intent upon ‘change’ or responsible for managing exposures, needs a rigorous, objective, measurement of the endogenous properties (complexity) that enables the functionality from which (through interactions with exogenous parties) the business generates the revenues that sustain it in changing and turbulent economic times.

“Complexity increases cost and decreases flexibility — often in unforeseen ways — and also tends to decrease stability,”….

Peter Leukert, CIO of Commerzbank

It is the number, nature and integrity of dynamic, multi-scalar, interactions that are the sources of strength (enabling performance greater than the sum of the parts). The ability to distinguish and respond to ‘signals’, that maintain the variety, effectiveness and agility of the complex system, from the ‘noise’ of flawed metrics, self-serving culture, hierarchical structure (silos), skewed incentives – of an unsustainable, failed or failing, model (reliant upon  assumption, reflexive, subjective, statistical analysis and prediction) that has its foundation in flawed (linear) economic thinking.

We won’t get different or better answers while we keep on asking the same questions.

For meaningful change to occur and to be sustained requires a rigorous justification, sufficient to counter financial projections that satisfy the goals of C-level short-termism that are detrimental to the stability and long term health of the business.

Adaptive Process versus The Sourcerer’s Apprentice

“Adaptive processes are therefore not about being chaotic, creative, un-structured or non-compliant but about using the real-world dynamics of work to create a process that fulfills all goals, follows all compliance rules and can change at the drop of a hat to be better NEXT TIME.”