It's tempting, especially in flux or crisis, to focus on silos in your organization.
The quarterly sales numbers are down, so you concentrate on the sales team. After pushing and not seeing results, you fire the sales director and hire a new one.
Numbers don't improve. If you had approached the situation from a systems-thinking perspective, you may have uncovered:
• The human resources department was pulling newer sales staff into all-day training sessions.
• The public relations department got an article published in an important trade magazine.
• Customers only wanted to buy the newest products.
• New products were on backorder. The plant manager concentrated on speeding up the machinery, not the people, and didn't share this issue with the sales director.
• Orders were coming faster than the sales department or plant could manage.
Strategies to develop an awareness campaign, moving experienced sales reps quickly onto a product, ramping up training people in the plant and having integrated departmental meetings would have induced the change you needed to effectively promote the new product and keep customers happy. In the latter scenario, you were approaching business development from a systemic vantage point.
If you have not applied systems-theory to your operation, you may be missing out on one of the most powerful approaches to change management. Traditional analysis focuses on separating the individual pieces of what is being studied.
Systems thinking, in contrast, focuses on how the thing being studied interacts with the other constituents of the system, a set of elements that interact to produce behavior. This means that instead of isolating smaller parts of the system being studied, systems thinking works by expanding its view to take into account larger numbers of interactions.
The result is sometimes strikingly different conclusions than those generated by traditional forms of analysis. Systems thinking requires thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness and context, as well as several shifts in perception, according to Systems Theorist Fritjof Capra.
When we move from a place of separate parts to a place of an integrated whole, we are actually building a sustainable organism. This theory can be applied to small companies, large organizations and even social movements.
Think of this as a way to grow vision, power and potential from utilizing the strengths of individual people and parts to maximize the final outcome. The interaction is as crucial as the actions alone.
Growth, change, optimal efficiencies, effectiveness and healthy organizations are the direct output from a systems-theory approach.
For more information, call Jessi LaCosta at (760) 720-9567 or visit www.bluerio.net.
The quarterly sales numbers are down, so you concentrate on the sales team. After pushing and not seeing results, you fire the sales director and hire a new one.
Numbers don't improve. If you had approached the situation from a systems-thinking perspective, you may have uncovered:
• The human resources department was pulling newer sales staff into all-day training sessions.
• The public relations department got an article published in an important trade magazine.
• Customers only wanted to buy the newest products.
• New products were on backorder. The plant manager concentrated on speeding up the machinery, not the people, and didn't share this issue with the sales director.
• Orders were coming faster than the sales department or plant could manage.
Strategies to develop an awareness campaign, moving experienced sales reps quickly onto a product, ramping up training people in the plant and having integrated departmental meetings would have induced the change you needed to effectively promote the new product and keep customers happy. In the latter scenario, you were approaching business development from a systemic vantage point.
If you have not applied systems-theory to your operation, you may be missing out on one of the most powerful approaches to change management. Traditional analysis focuses on separating the individual pieces of what is being studied.
Systems thinking, in contrast, focuses on how the thing being studied interacts with the other constituents of the system, a set of elements that interact to produce behavior. This means that instead of isolating smaller parts of the system being studied, systems thinking works by expanding its view to take into account larger numbers of interactions.
The result is sometimes strikingly different conclusions than those generated by traditional forms of analysis. Systems thinking requires thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness and context, as well as several shifts in perception, according to Systems Theorist Fritjof Capra.
When we move from a place of separate parts to a place of an integrated whole, we are actually building a sustainable organism. This theory can be applied to small companies, large organizations and even social movements.
Think of this as a way to grow vision, power and potential from utilizing the strengths of individual people and parts to maximize the final outcome. The interaction is as crucial as the actions alone.
Growth, change, optimal efficiencies, effectiveness and healthy organizations are the direct output from a systems-theory approach.
For more information, call Jessi LaCosta at (760) 720-9567 or visit www.bluerio.net.