Holding a chalk on a blackboard reminisces our school days when our teacher taught us good things like discipline, values, ethics, how things should be, what we should and shouldn't be doing, etc in addition to arcane formulae and abstract theory. More than 25 years later, holding a marker pen on a whitehoard, when I narrate how should the processes and measures be designed for an organization to cope with emerging realities, I was being hailed as 'too theoretical' by 'street-smart' businessmen. It made me realize there are businessess (managers) that operate under the paradigm of 'here, now, action, quick-and-dirty-first-and-think-later'. Though a late revealation to me, this, I found is nothing unusual in today's quarter-to-quarter operations. Any non-linear System can be approximated to a number of linear 'short performance segments' between successive quarters. Technically sound enough, provided everyone has the sight on the ultimate big-picture--the System (organization and its interconnected processes) and its ultimate goal. How many of managers/leaders live long enough in organizations to strive for systems that span across divisions and years-and-quarters before they quit at their opportunite time? We can shrug it off by saying management is complex. No ? Am I sounding theoretical again? This time I can afford to be as I'm teaching the fundamentals of Systems to innocent-and-not-yet-street-smart young engineers in college. One of the first few lessons is classifying systems into various categories; what could be a better way to treat systems than by stretching across the two extremes of reality: Simple and Predictable ENGINEERING SYSTEMS and Complex and 'messy' HUMAN SYSTEMS.
We know the weird treatment we give to Systems in people-centric organizations: if something is successful, we jump up to take credit as our heroic effort ("I made the numbers or my team made it, I/we deserve the incentive".) When there's a down-turn or some disaster, we blame it on the invisible 'system'. Right? But what happens when there's already an identified 'guinea pig' the world/media portrayed as the 'villain', it is even more simple--defend the system (of course, we're still part of it) by 'blaming it on Rio?'
Now, we understand why Human Systems are complex whose behavious is subjective to multiple social/legal/culural/ethical interpretations. If there's a productivity fall of 15%, we attribute it to some manager's inefficiency and cut his incentives accordingly; if some employee misrepresented his tour-expenses and wrongly claimed Rs.1000 as excess amount, we paint him as integrity violator and fire him; and if some CEO misappropriated shareholders' money by faking accounts, we tem it as fraud and prefix it with self-satisfying superlatives and socially obstracize him. Inefficiency, integrity, fraud, minor frauid, major fraud, cheating,...terminologica inertia drives our reactions, when in fact, scientifically or systemically all mean one word (sans human attributed colour): systemic error. That's why we love engineering systems; however, complicated they might be (think of a mobile phone, A-380 aircraft, they all obey systems principles.) They do not have human biases. They learn from each other. For example, in the event of an air crash involving, say, A-380 aircraft with more than a million parts, we do not just fire the pilot or CEO of the company; instead, we examine the root-cause of the accident by thoroughly investigating the system (in the light of evidence provided by the flight's Black-Box) and identifying preventive measures (or fixing the troubled elements in the system) which become part of the LESSONS LEARNT and which get disseminated to every other entity (manufacturer, pilot, airports,...) in the system anywhere in the world. The 'systemic error' in this case could be one 'simple' loosened but (left inadvertently by the oversight of a maintenance mechanic or due to unforeseen behaviour of material in extreme conditions) which caused the major disaster. In the aircraft industry, these important lessons will never be swept under the carpet. Systems become robust and reliable over time through continuous learning loops (LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS).
I believe Systems Thinking is not theoretical as presumed by many harried operational managers. When effectively internalized by them, I am convinced it facilitates creative decision making and design of fault-tolerant systems. Systems Thinking is science and I enjoy teaching it now with chalk on the blackboard. SCIENCE SPEAKS 'SATYAM'.
KG Krishna
(C) 2010, KG Krishna
