System Sensitivity
I assume that Wovoka — Jack Wilson’s catastrophic vision during an eclipse on January 1st 1888 resulted from his understanding of the system the European invaders installed when taking possession of the land of his people. He had learned enough to see natural disasters as a last consequence of our actions. Josef K. in Kafka’s Trial (Der Prozess) instead seeks to codify a system which appears as surreal, implemented and executed by people he does not know. Clamence in Albert Camus’ Fall (La Chute) finally analyzes himself, until an external event triggers his understanding of the real purposes of his behavior. At times we get the picture even if we do not have all the pieces that form it, but we cannot react. Sometimes the picture is crystal clear but we still do not react.
Complex systems do not appear as one complete body, as there are too many components and moving parts. Once we have enough pieces and can “connect the dots”, we might see a picture of the construction and our interpretation of the purpose or impact a system has. Systems are not an end in themselves, they change, connect and expand. Knowing systems is one challenge, the other one is to understand how they evolve.
Zoom in, Zoom out
New conditions and external factors can impact any system, the entire construction and every detail it contains. Technology has been such a factor, over the past decades technological innovations made it into any corner of the complex system an organization represents. Today we have to deal with factors we cannot control in the way we could control technology: climate change, social innovation, urban development, immigration, a pandemic. I am convinced that these new factors that impact our organizations require internal change processes to respond to them, to adapt, or turn them into opportunities.
In my professional world, which is not anywhere close to the one of a spiritual leader, but at times kafkaesque and political, I worked with legacy industries to address the aforementioned factors that will impact the future success of their core product and competence. The discussions with executives do not evolve just around the contents of strategies, but around the obstacles of change and innovation processes which are frequently internal roadblocks, departments and middle management that take their areas in hostage.
I believe that there is a common recognition that external innovation hubs can be efficient marketing tools, but not efficient for integrated, sustainable, and evolving innovation processes in an organization. While there must be guidance with an overall strategic plan, change will evolve bottom up. Such a strategy should not be a complete, detailed manual, but allow to root and grow.
There are also change processes evolving from the inside out that had not been planned. Bad leadership habits and a toxic work culture can change an organization in a negative way, so do strategies people can not identify with. Also opportunities can be discovered internally at any level, and should lead to positive developments and innovations - if a healthy work environment and a flexible organizational design allows that. In both cases, early recognition is key to either correct the reasons or to support new developments.
As it is not always obvious when and where these developments start, it is not always predictable where they lead to. Data might tell us once it is too late. It requires social intelligence and sensitivity towards people and systems to recognize change, to predict a possible series of consequential impacts, and to be in time to be able to react. The art of leadership is the capacity to embrace a possibly large part of a system, keeping the overview, but using the examination of details to either see evolutions happening or to engage change processes.
Some Management techniques address the assessment of system components, like for instance Quality Function Deployment (Japan, 1966), one of the many predecessors design thinking builds on, consciously or unconsciously. However, they do not serve the increasing complexity of our organizations, the evolutionary character of “living systems” and the need to understand and monitor activities that can change a system partially or completely.
System thinking in Design
In Strategic Design we aim to build impact through specifically designed strategic interventions that engage innovation and change processes in larger systems. The experimental, iterative approach of design thinking is certainly suitable for a design that is never absolute or final. To test a human reaction on a proposed design and to learn from the reaction to improve it with a refined version is evolutionary, indeed. However, projects in organizational design, design for social innovation, as well as participatory design initiatives are too big to be prototyped, too complex to be tested in order to predict their impact.
In development processes we still want to sense if an endeavor evolves in the desired direction. If we “un-puzzle” our system to subsystems and single functions, we can prototype and test our new design interventions with these specific functions. We visualize them in function trees as they are used in UX design and software development. If one of these tests with the components evolve in a certain way, we can better see how this might influence other components in the system we are designing for. If one function works out in a non-anticipated way, how does this impact a related function, and finally an entire system? It can be as simple as testing an internal communication before launching it. Nothing is too small here, I remember a chemistry teacher who said that you could verse a finger hut of a chemical substance in the Indian Ocean, and theoretically you could prove afterwards the presence of this substance in the North Sea. Therefore, if I tweak something at the bottom left corner of a Development Matrix, I should see how that impacts the upper right corner.
All visualization tools in the Design of a strategic intervention attempt to embrace complexity, organize and reorganize categories with their functionalities and actions to see how they can be interrelated and coincide. This shows the limitation of acting alone or in isolation, whether it is an individual, a department of a company, or an organization working in a certain area. The more complex our challenges, systems and organizations become, the more important it is to understand any entity as a part of a wider network.
I believe that in order to see the potential of a collaboration or a project, we need direct and authentic human interactions. Any strategic plan that is not rooted in “real” scenarios is destined to fail, as it can not evolve bottom up and make it to any level of a system or organization for flexible interpretations to keep the system alive.
System Sensitivity is an inner compass which is fed with real human interactions, that help to understand reasons and to anticipate consequences. You can predict upcoming developments and changes in a system, if you have the capacity to see a large number of details independently and in various configurations together.
Co-relations
It can well be that it is not the main purpose of a system that will have lasting impact. When we designed the functions of mobile phones, nobody could foresee that texting will be the main use in mobile communication, not to mention the “side effects” of social media.
Needless to say that this principle can be used for manipulations the authors are perfectly aware of. It is a strategic move to install functions to enable a main purpose, that do not appear upfront, but have a convenient or lucrative side effect. The main purpose is to cultivate social contacts, to do so we provide personal data. We know that.
We also know what our livestyle does to our environment, just that those side effects are not good for anyone. When do we have enough information to understand how a system that we are a part of is impacting our lives? At what point do we know too much and cannot see the wood for the trees? Until when do we still have time to react? At some point change is underway and very difficult, if not impossible to stop. This change does not happen only in the systems we are part of. It happens in ourselves. If we assist a deteriorating workplace culture and do not react but comply, we create another precedent of acceptance with every day we continue. We get numb, and at some point we are not valuable contributors any more.
Albert Camus’ Clamence with his fake image that he uses to dominate and control others seems more actual than ever before. We dedicate a lot of attention to how we appear online. We use social media platforms to understand what is going on around us, data and technology to assess what is happening inside our organizations. In a similar way there is a real self that is not necessarily compliant with the managed self. A discrepancy might turn into a wrong resilience: when you realize that the contributions you make to a greater system you are part of are implemented in a misleading way, when you see that not all components of a system you identify with for the main purpose align with your values, when you realize that responses to external changes are fake or false, when every pore of your body says it is time to change.
