Handbook for Strategic HR - Section 4: Thinking Systematically and Strategically

By OD Network, John Vogelsang PhD, Maya Townsend and 6 more

Thinking systemically and strategically means moving beyond a focus on the individual to understand the larger organizational and environmental systems and how the dynamics of those systems impact work performance and the readiness for change. This section will explain how certain problems recur and are often made worse by quick solutions; how one decision can impact many people and set in motion a situation that can create numerous unexpected outcomes for the organization; and how to decide where best to begin fostering change—with individuals, groups, departments, the organization (policies, practices, culture, etc.), or the external market/community relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814436998

OD Network

OD PRACTITIONER is the quarterly journal of the Organization Development Network, an international association whose members are committed to practicing organization development as an applied behavioral science.

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SECTION FOUR

THINKING SYSTEMICALLY AND STRATEGICALLY

Introduction

John Vogelsang and Matt Minahan

VOICES FROM THE FIELD

When I am asked to work on a problem, I now lead with questions, whereas in the past I would lead with directives. I learned how to think systemically and to pay attention to what are the implications of what is happening for the organization’s strategy and the functioning of the organization as a whole … I now focus on making every interaction strategic.

—Philip Anderson

Most critical to my being successful at my role are facilitation skills, being able to build coalitions, and being able to think systemically—having a sweeping understanding of how actions and decisions in various divisions and departments connect and affect each other.

—Michael McGovern

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS SECTION

•   How to move beyond a focus on the individual to understand the larger organizational and environmental systems and how the dynamics of those systems impact work performance and the readiness for change.

•   How to decide where strategically to foster change—individual, dyad, group, department, the organization (policies, practices, culture, etc.), or the organization and market/community relationship.

•   How to utilize the evolving understanding of approaches/models for organizational systems to discern what might be missing if there are gaps/low performance and how to strategically foster better functioning organizational systems.

WHY THINKING SYSTEMICALLY AND STRATEGICALLY

A successful HR business partner needs to move beyond just a focus on the individual to understand how the larger system, including groups, the organization as a whole, and the external environment, impact work performance, the readiness for change, and the capacity for creativity. What is labeled underperformance of an individual or a group may be the outcome of many influences including: an unsatisfactory supervisory/coworker relationship, organizational policies, resource allocation, the organizational culture, the design of the organization, and changes in the external business environment.

Thinking systemically means understanding how certain problems recur and are often made worse by quick solutions, and projecting how one decision can impact many people and set in motion a situation that can create many unexpected outcomes for the organization. It is a way to take into account the multiple perspectives, the learned and persistent behaviors, the many formal and informal work relationships, the various organizational structures, and the pervasive organizational culture that influence a situation. It is a way to find a relationship point where change can be made that ripples through the interactions that compose the organization. Operating from a systemic perspective also enables the HR Business Partner to gain a sense of where best to begin fostering change—at the individual level, dyads, groups, departments, the organization (policies, practices, culture, design), or the market/community relationship. All are interconnected.

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS SECTION

In this section HR Business Partners will find chapters about the key elements of a systemic and strategic approach to fostering organizational effectiveness. After defining systems thinking and describing an evolving understanding of organizational systems, this section presents various organizational design models and approaches for how to be strategic about improving an organization’s ability to serve its customers. The articles are divided into three topic areas:

•   Systems Thinking: The Connectedness of Everything

•   An Evolving Understanding of Systems Thinking

•   Designing Organizations

Systems Thinking: The Connectedness of Everything

An organization may be taking too long for product development. One approach would look at this as an employee performance issue. A systems approach might look at whether there is a good fit among the production equipment, organization hiring practices, and communication and collaboration among the product developers, management, and the manufacturing division. Looking at an organization’s various systems might reveal that there are similar patterns of misalignments in other divisions and departments, which might be creating chaos among the various systems to the extent that they are unable to integrate their efforts toward a common goal because they are focusing on functional objectives in order to survive. William Becker (2005) in General Systems Theory: What is it? Is There an Application Example for OD? describes elements of a general systems approach that can help managers understand how to foster organizational adaptability to current and emerging environments and, thereby, survive.

Veronica Hooper Carter (2004), in Gestalt OSD and Systems Theory: A Perspective on Levels of System and Intervention Choices, provides key principles from a Gestalt psychology systems thinking perspective to inform how HR Business Partners position themselves as interveners, how they make meaning of what they see, and what actions they take at what level of the system. To follow these principles means that to understand a situation the HR professional enters with curiosity, reserves judgment, operates with patience and tolerance, and focuses on an ongoing process of learning. Rather than seeking a scapegoat to blame and or a hero to rescue everyone, they recognize that many aspects of the system influence what is happening and will influence what will change.

What contributes to a high performing system? Why is it that organizations do better than other similar organizations that are composed of similar people, utilize similar technologies, pursuing similar goals, or adhere to similar standards? As an answer to these questions, Peter Vaill (1977), in Towards a Behavioral Description of High-Performing Systems, provides a list of 44 hypotheses based upon his experience working with many different kinds of organizations. The purpose of the list is to provide a basis for determining to what extent managers are inadvertently managing organizations today in such a way as to prevent high performance.

An Evolving Understanding of Systems Thinking

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, approaches to organizational systems have gone through two major evolutions. As we proceed into the 21st Century, a third evolution with roots in the previous century is reshaping how we see the workplace and how we foster change.

For years, managers believed that organizational success was fostered by the mechanistic approach to organizational systems. Through a division of labor, hierarchical decision making and authority structures, and the scientific method (diagnosis and address the particular cause of a problem) organizations could be structured to be effective and productive.

Some of the Scientific/Mechanistic metaphors for the organizational system include:

•   The Thermostat—changes in environment contributes to responses in the thermostat which returns the environment to the desired state

•   The Assembly Line—each part fits together in a continuous linear assembly process to make the whole

•   Cogs and Gears—each entity is part of a precise arrangement that allows transfer of energy and movement from one part to the other

The Mechanistic System is often focused on gaining maximum efficiency from workers and machines by determining through time and motion studies the best methods to perform a task in the least amount of time. Managers measure, decide, monitor, standardize, maintain control, and fix problems by finding the one underlying cause. Decision-making is maintained at higher levels and a hierarchy of control holds all the parts in place.

Fritjof Capra summarizes the basic beliefs behind this approach: the world is a mechanical system, the body is a machine, life is a competitive struggle, and unlimited progress is achieved through economic and technological growth (Capra, 1982).

Gradually, another metaphor for organizational systems developed: organizations as organic, open systems that adapt, impact, and co-evolve with other systems in a given situation. Stuart Kauffman offers an amusing example of how the patchwork of co-evolutionary changes impact each other:

The car comes in and drives the horse out. When the horse goes, so does the smithy the saddlery, the stable, the harness shop, buggies, and in your West, out goes the Pony Express. But once cars are around, it makes sense to expand the oil industry, build gas stations dotted over the countryside, and pave the roads. Once the roads are paved, people start driving all over creation, so motels make sense. What with the speed, traffic lights, traffic cops, traffic courts, and the quiet bribe to get off your parking ticket make their way into the economy and our behavior patterns. (Kauffman, 1995, p. 279)

Rather than measuring, standardizing, and controlling to develop and stabilize the organization, the organic/open system is grown and replicated by designing organizations that respond to the environment, internal capabilities, and change while maintaining balance, a sense of stability, and clarity (Hinrichs, 2009). The organization maintains its stability by staying true to its genetic code: its mission, vision, values, history, and working agreements. Organic/open systems metaphors for the organization include different types of living organisms, the cell with its nuclei, and the human body with its interdependent parts. The major concerns of management include: enable and empower, foster responsiveness, growth, and change, and be the keeper and promulgator of the code: the mission, vision, values, history, and working agreements.

The organic/open system approaches emphasize team work, team management, flat organizational structures, participatory management, empowerment processes for employees, and managers acting as interdependent mentors and coaches.

Organic/open System approaches also seek to build healthy organizations based upon models of what has worked in other situations. Some of the models of healthy organic/open system organizations are dealt with in the organizational models section below.

In Chaos and Complexity: What Can Science Teach?, Margaret Wheatley (1993) describes a shift in consciousness and focus that is occurring:

So what is this shift in consciousness that is required of us and what is the true paradigm that needs to change? I believe that it is a simple but profound world shattering recognition that we do inhabit a well-ordered universe. It functions well, even without us. Stewart Kaufmann, a scientist working in complexity theory, has said, This is a world where you get order for free. Order arises spontaneously when you create simple connections. If you require simple connections among thousands upon thousands of individual elements, a pattern of organization emerges. We get order for free. This discovery of order has moved most dramatically in the past twenty years in the area of science first known as chaos. Now it is a more complex science. Of course, mystics in every spiritual tradition have known about this order for a very long time.

Order arises spontaneously when you create simple connections. The emerging approach does not see Organizations as entities controlled or encouraged to grow by senior leadership but ongoing, self-organizing constructs within the various, complex, and evolving relationships among the people involved. Ralph Stacey says,

What an organization becomes would be thought of as emerging from the relationships of its members rather than being determined simply by the global choices of some individuals… the very constitution of organizations depends on its product of local knowledge through local language practices…making sense of organizational life requires attending to the ordinary, everyday communicative interaction between people at their own local level of interactions in the living present. (Stacy, 2001, pp. 8, 144, 163)

Duncan Watts (2003) offers two metaphors for organizations as ongoing constructs: fireflies in Papua, New Guinea, and the Internet. Fireflies will start the evening with erratic flashing but as the evening progresses thousands will pulse in synchronicity. The Internet continues to grow without a master plan but people are still able to send an email that reaches a distant country in seconds. Watts says that all this works because there are clusters—people, insects, computers—that are closely connected but across and between these clusters are a few random (sometimes planned) connections that rapidly shrink the distance between the clusters. Viewing organizations this way, management tends to encourage clusters of expertise and practices (work teams, action learning groups, etc.), cross function connections, and random informal connections to other people inside and outside the organization:

… it appears that a good strategy for building organizations that are capable of solving problems is to train individuals to react to ambiguity by searching through their social networks, rather than forcing them to build and contribute to centrally designed problem solving tools and databases. (p. 289)

Organizations are communication and relationship networks. Whatever design is developed in a particular organization is both born of and fosters how people are organizing, relating, and communicating to effectively carry out the mission and vision.

These newer approaches to organizational systems, variously called complex adaptive systems or dialogic systems, focus more on the processes of communicating and organizing but not at the expense of formally identified organizational designs. The role of leadership in such a system is to assure the flow of communication among the various groups; to be a broker of responsibility, a connector, and a promoter of relationships that contribute to learning and self-organization; to disturb and nurture the patterns of relationships; to hold the anxiety of constant change; to be a participant in the constructing/reconstructing of the core purpose, values, working agreements, and outcomes in the organization; and to be mindful of:

•   The changes that only need to be acknowledged because they are already happening and are deepening and extending current practices

•   The changes that need to be influenced because they need some support and direction to occur and they have the potential to further improve current practices and/or create new practices

•   The changes that need a plan of action to happen because they are new directions, new practices or the seeds for future development¹

As Bushe and Marshak in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science expanded version (2009) of their article Postmodern Turn in OD (2008), that is included here, say,

First, Dialogic OD change processes emphasize changing the normal, everyday conversations that take place in the system (Barrett et al, 1995). This can be done in a variety of ways, including changing who normally takes part in these conversations, changing how people have these conversations, changing conversational patterns (Ford & Ford, 2008), changing the skills people bring to these conversations (Bushe, 2009), and by changing the framings and content of what the conversations are about (Marshak & Grant, 2008). Secondly, there may or may not be a data collection phase, but when there is, there is seldom the assumption that an objective reality or set of facts exist to be discovered or discerned. Instead, processes of inquiry are used to surface, legitimate, and/or learn from the variety of realities that exist in the system. In short, there is no attempt to objectively diagnose the system per se. Third, the aim is to generate new images, stories, narratives, and socially constructed realities that affect how people in the system think and act. (2009, p. 361)

The newer approaches to organization systems are concerned with transforming the conversations and relationships in organizations in order to transform the organization.

Designing Organizations

Models of organizational designs have been very useful when operating from an Organic systems theory to analyze and strategize about what needs to change in an organization. The complex adaptive and dialogic approaches operate with the assumption that organizational designs are idiosyncratic to whatever group or organization in which they develop. Using innovations or change processes from one organization to the other may result in different outcomes. However, one organizational construct that has been useful for both Organic and complex adaptive/dialogic approaches is organizational culture.

Organizational Culture

Edgar Schein (2000), in Corporate Culture, defines the nature of and offers an approach for analyzing culture. Understanding organizational culture helps practitioners identify which beliefs, values, and principles are explicit and which are implicit and possibly influence all that an organization does. In other words, the explicit aspects of an organization’s culture—the office layout, people working in teams, action learning groups—and an organization’s espoused beliefs may express a commitment to collaboration, participation, and valuing each other’s input. However, management may at times operate from implicit, underlying assumptions and push aside team accountability and collaboration in order to effect quick decisions; thereby undermining collaboration. Understanding culture can also help transform the conversation by identifying how the work environment is an expression of the underlying values and beliefs and how what is said and done is shaped by what is assumed.

Why is it that highly mission driven organizations dedicated to serving others or to advocating social changes often function in the very way they are trying to counteract in the larger society? Why do they become a traumatized system where there are recurring conversations without resolutions, groupthink, and contagious stress? Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann (2002), in Trauma and Healing in Organizations, use an approach for understanding both the explicit and implicit, strengths and shadows, in an organization’s culture. This approach provides a way for members of an organization to see the shadow as a starting point for systemic analysis and insight, self-awareness, and for aligning their organizational structures and processes with their mission and values.

Too often managers see the departure of skilled women and people of color as an individual situation and fail to examine the systemic nature of the workplace culture that may have influenced their departure. Many organizations see building a diverse and inclusive workplace as a distinct program to address a particular problem rather than a need for organizational culture change. Judith Katz and Fred Miller (2001), in Diversity and Inclusion as a Major Culture Change Intervention, offer a case study of changing an organization’s culture to become a culture of inclusion that leverages diversity as a way of life. They describe the path from status quo to a culture of inclusion and the six strategic levers that help drive the culture change.

Organic/Open System Models

Gina Hinrichs (2009), in Organic Organizational (Org²) Design, gives an overview of various organizational design approaches. Those approaches include Weisbord’s Six Box Model, Galbraith’s Star Model, Gelinas and James’ Collaborative Organizational Design, Hiock and Getzendanner’ Chaordic Design, and others. She then offers Org² Design as an approach that builds upon the best of that organizational design thinking and provides a guide to designing either a part of or a whole organization.

Hinrichs Org² Design has six facets:

•   Purpose (mission) is pursuing what is deeply meaningful; the reason for being is a foundational level of purpose.

•   Principles (values and beliefs) are clear, commonly understood and agreed upon statements of what will guide the behavior of the participants in pursuit of purpose.

•   Practices (behaviors) are specific working agreements on How to operate and grow together.

•   Participants are members of the organization. Participants define who is involved and how he/she or the team contributes, is valued, and valuable.

•   Processes define the work and information flows that produce value for the customer and community.

•   Pieces are the organizational configuration or structure. Pieces are aligned and coordinated groupings of Participants executing the Processes and utilizing resources (especially information) to further the Purpose/strategy of the organization.

Another way to look at organizations is as circulatory systems. Art Kleiner (2007), in Organizational Circulatory Systems, describes four circulatory systems, how they work, and the implications for intervention in organizations. The four systems are Hierarchy (the flow of authority), the Clan (core group), the Market (flow of work), and the Network (the flow of knowledge).

Greg Vaughan (2003), in Participative Design: An Overview, contrasts the mechanistic model (Design Principal 1) with the organic (Design Principle 2). Design Principle 1 is a:

… command and control structure where responsibility for coordination and control of work occur one level above where the work is being done … The other is an organizational structure where coordination and control occur by those