Systemic AND Systematic change - working together

Looking at systems views of managing change today, I strayed into a discussion on systemic vs systematic change which links strongly to my previous observations on Leandro Herrero’s work. I had struggled with the contrasting of systemic and systematic as opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps as a non-overlapping dichotomy, particularly when authors (like Ison [1]) decry the systematic, project-based view of managing change. Although this has its limitations, particularly when driven by targets, it can deliver successful change in well-defined situations. We use projects to successfully design and build aeroplanes that do not fall from the sky (at least not often), despite the thousands of components that need to operate together.

Helen Wilding asked whether there could be a theory of systemic change (based on learning) versus systematic change (based on optimising). However, she highlighted one of Checkland’s papers [2] that gave a different view on this. Contrasting hard (systematic) and soft (systemic) systems approaches, he made the assertion that the hard systems approach is a subset of soft systems. When systems are (relatively) simple, the soft systems approach can be condensed to a simpler target-driven hard systems approach, which can be successfully achieved with a systematic project.

So am I suggesting that building a plane is simple! Not really, but I am suggesting that it is complicated rather than complex. The complexity occurs when a system has emergent behaviour, that could not have been predicted from its component parts. And emergence particularly arises from including people within the system.

Checkland and Herrero both seem to support the idea that systemic and systematic is not an either/or question for managing complex change situations – both are required as a combination of soft and hard systems approaches.


[1] Ison, R., 2010, Systems Practice: how to act in a climate-change world, Springer Publications, London, 224-229.

[2] Checkland, P., 1985, "From Optimizing to Learning: A Development of Systems Thinking for the 1990s.", The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 36(9), 757–767.

Organisations and the laws of thermodynamics

In  Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Pascale starts to describe organisations as complex adaptive systems, rather than using the more traditional functional forms.  It's interesting that complext adaptive systems have four properties:

• composed of many agents acting in parallel
• continuously shuffling the building blocks
• subject to the second law of thermodynamics, exhibiting entropy and winding down
• has the capacity for pattern recognition

It's the third property that fascinates me - as this seems the significant step up from traditional analysis of organisational forms and strategy.  Alfred Marshall defined the maths that describe economics as a science to be compared with physics.  This used fundamentally first law principles, and worked as a theory in periods of slow market change.  However, since the technologically revolutions of the last 20th century, the first law principles seem to fall down regularly.

Enter Pascale and the era of complex adaptive systems.  The organisation and the market cannot be controlled or predicted purely by considering energy - if we invest more in X, we can defeat competitive spending in Y.  The equation becomes more complex, with the evolution of unexpected outomes and the time-based nature of the second law - the impact of energy recedes over time as entropy increases.

I wonder if there is some future business analogy to the 3rd law?

Or perhaps we have already seen it - complex adaptive systems are at risk when in equilibrium - a precursor to death.  Perhaps the regular death of major companies is an exhibition of equilibrium at absolute zero - energy exhange with the environment has declined to zero as the processes ossify and the ability to change is reduced to zero.

Post industrial scarcity and Natural Capitalism

I've been reading a Harvard Business Review article on Natural Capitalism (Lovins et al 1999), and just discovered this is also a book. The article highlights numerous ideas for a greener business environment - re-glazing that pays back cost and energy output inside two years, penny-pinching on wiring that drives up lifetime costs and energy output and innovative services/leases that can change the economic question from initial investment appraisal to total cost of ownership savings.

But the really interesting comment that struck me towards the end was "most businesses are behaving as if people were scarce and nature abundant - the conditions that fueled the first Industrial Revolution". But today's conditions are reversed - people are abundant and natural resources are becoming scarce. That's quite a philosophical challenge to the accepted business strategy norms. How does off-shoring continue to make sense with this philosophy - given the abundance of people here and the increased energy requirements of moving manufacturing overseas (and transporting finished goods back).

The (current) normal business response to a financial challenge/crisis is to cut costs - normally headcount costs and particularly in the "support functions". But if this reduces the amount of maintenance (see BP's record or New York city's bridge maintenance deferral problem), the ultimate cost (in both natural resources and financial capital) can exceed the initial savings. Lovins et al called for a broader measure of business performance - measuring and effectively using human and natural capital as well as financial capital. At least one company has taken this forward seriously - Novo Nordisk in reporting on their triple bottom line.

However, even this triple bottom line reporting is missing the intangible nature of novel ideas. It is said that "creativity, knowledge, innovation and learning now add value far more than land, labour or capital" (OU, p15). Perhaps a quadruple bottom line is needed for the learning organisation.

Change Management: toolkits for change or Viral Change

The standard model for change management seems to be (1) decide on the change, engaging a few people if you have to, (2) create the project/programme plan, (3) set out the vision and communicate it, (4) tell people what you want them to do differently and (5) run the project ... reinforcing the message in the hope that people will change.  There are numerous change toolkits available on the web to support this methodology.  But, with continuing reports of 70% failure rate of change initiatives, isn't it time for a change in managing change?

Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful change

I've recently been reading Viral Change (by Leandro Herrero). This puts the case for easing change into an organisation by:

• Framing the change in an appropriate language
• Identifying (and rewarding) a non-negotiable set of new behaviours
• A Change Champion network, who are given the principles of the change and the new behaviours, and then set free to influence ... supported by management rather than reporting to management, and supporting each other through a simple communications channel
• When changes in behaviour are apparent in some areas, broadcast (and reward) this change

This approach focuses on changing people's regular behaviours rather than some nebulous "culture". Rather than a huge top-down programme of change, the initiative becomes one of modelling the change (through managers and change agents), focussing on the positive behavioural changes that start to happen and allowing the organisation to adapt the programme to local circumstances. This feels like a radical new platform for addressing the challenges of organisational change.

2012 update We recently persuaded Leandro Herrero to come and present to the Henley Management group Leadership of Organisational Change. Focussing more on his new book Homo Imitans, he highlighted the problems of traditional change programmes (formal leadership, communication channels and push ... leading to limited success) and compared with his proposed "world II"  change which focusses on behaviours, social copying, informal networks stories and leaders staying backstage.  A challenge to the normal organisational hierarchy, but with the continuing massive failure rate of change programmes, something different is needed ...

The "strategic pause" in creativity

I mentioned the "strategic pause" in my last blog, and seem to have taken one ... with no entries for a year. I recalled term again today in reading about processes for creativity. There are numerous descriptions of characteristics, personality profiles and tests of creativity, which identify skills such as originality, flexibility, problem identification and reframing.
However, a rather different perspective considers the skills needed for the process of creativity, rather than the content. These seem to be:

• an intrinsic motivation - interest in the challenge for its own sake
• objectivity - to quickly identify and reject ideas that are not going to work
• problem-finding skills
• a tolerance for ambiguity - to avoid premature closure, settling on a less effective solution too soon

It was this last comment that brought me back to the "strategic pause". As I commented last time, delaying acting, delaying coming to a decision, and taking to time to think and allow events to unfold ... are skills that are rarely rewarded in fast-paced business where action is rewarded over thinking.