A Job Description for Systems Thinking

Michael Zang asked how to distill the essence of Systems Thinking into a job description?

Michael's question starts with the challenge of "selling" the idea of a Systems Director to an organization with little experience in this area. The job description therefore contributes to at least four different objectives.

1. To create vision and confidence that there is a job worth doing here (in other words selling).
2. To help select a suitable candidate for the job, without unduly narrowing the field.
3. To help determine a reasonable remuneration for the job.
4. To provide guidance and support to the job-holder, without unduly constraining initiative and innovation.

One of the challenges of a "job description" for systems thinking is that the traditional job description represents a fixed decomposition of responsibilities within the organization. The job-holder is required to carry out such-and-such specified activities, and produce such-and-such specified outcomes. This kind of job description comes out of a reductionist view of the organization. (This remains true even if the description is analysed in terms of systems-friendly "behavioural competences". Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of reductionism, of course, as long as you don't imagine it's the whole story.)

Whereas a System Director will be working on the whole enterprise-as-a-system and the outcomes may be hard to define in advance. Maybe that's why there aren't many of them.

If you are going to have a System Director, that person will be a leader of systems thinking across the organization, not just going into a darkened room to "do systems thinking" with a small bunch of like-minded chums. In fact, you may follow her around the office and not see any activity that corresponds to a text-book description of what systems thinking is supposed to look like, but things just start to shift in interesting and positive ways.

So one way to explore the role of a System Director would be using the VPEC-T systems thinking framework. The "Content" of the job is presumably about system thinking and transformation, but the other elements (especially "Values" and "Trust") are perhaps more about Leadership.

A typical way of running an organization is that there is collective leadership exercised by all the directors together (notwithstanding the obvious fact that some directors will have more power than others) and in addition each director provides leadership in one specialist area. The role of Systems Director implies that one director is a specialist in systems thinking and systems practice, and brings this specialism (the Content in VPEC-T terms) to the general role of leadership.

Simply by opening up a discussion about the nature of leadership roles within an organization, and using a system-thinking lens like VPEC-T to provide a light structure to the discussion, could be a really good way of edging the organization into new ways of tackling complex problems.

The question of Trust is clearly a major issue for any organization. The System Director will draw a decent salary (presumably commensurate with her status in the organization), consume other resources, demand time and attention from her peers, push people out of their comfort zones, and so on, all for the sake of some uncertain and unquantifiable benefits to the organization. There is a much greater commitment here than employing an external consultant, so a considerable degree of trust is required.

But "selling" is not just getting an organization to accept the idea of "Systems Director". What's more important is for the organization to be able to trust the person occupying this role.

And in many unreflective organizations, people are trusted if and only if they fit the organization's stereotype of what people should be like. And yet someone who fits this stereotype may be unable to perform the role. So there is a critical tension to be confronted here.

For me then, what's most interesting about the job description is not the contents of the finished document (competences, outcomes, and so on) but the process of negotiating it - so that it provides a focus for critical discussions between stakeholders and their advisers that will help set appropriate expectations about the role, and start to build the trust that will be required.

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Afterword

When this question was put to the Linked-In Systems Thinking group, some of the discussants went to some slightly unproductive places, perhaps responding in advance to positions they imagined others might take. For example, arguing which of the many available schools of systems thinking should be written into the job description. (My own opinion is that it would be better to keep the job description as neutral as possible rather than writing it in the language of any one school in particular.) There was also some (in my view wholly unnecessary) deprecation of people who don't share The Vision, dismissing them as left-brained Cartesians, with a special dig at accountants. One of the enemies of the systems approach (as identified by Churchman) is politics. Even in a Systems Thinking discussion group (which a naive person might imagine would know better) we can see how easily how schism emerges and the debate gets unnecessarily politicized.

Pick a Number

#systemsthinking #deming @dpjoyce asks "Anyone know where exactly Deming's 95% came from? Was is actual data? Vanguard also quote this, what did they study?"

Deming and his followers use a figure of 95% in at least two different contexts. 

• 95% of problems are system-related (whatever that means)
  
• 95% of the so-called improvement initiatives are futile because people don’t know the profound knowledge or competency

Vanguard repeats the first claim. For example "They found that 95% of the answers were down to a problem with the system rather than the worker." (via David Joyce). But this only makes sense if you draw the boundaries of the system to exclude the worker, which many systems thinkers would find puzzling or perverse.

I have found two sources that credit the second observation to Peter Scholtes.

• Nomination for the Deming medal (Peter Scholtes website)
• Pareto Distribution: Deming, Juran and Simon’s Rule and Worlds of Knowledge (Hanching Seminars and Consulting, 1998/11)

I tend to read this kind of claim as more rhetorical than scientific. Not only is it hard to find any empirical study that might support this kind of claim, it is difficult to see what kind of evidence might be adduced.

As I pointed out in my paper Reasoning about Systems and their Properties, to decide that one intervention is successful and another is futile is an act of interpretation, and assumes we know which system we are talking about, from whose perspective, with what timescale, and so on. In order to have any credible basis for dismissing an intervention as "futile" or "meddling" or "tampering", you actually have to do a full systems analysis on the case, and the results could still be disputed. You can't jump to conclusions - "Oh, this didn't work, so the people who attempted it obviously didn't know what they were doing" - because success and failure and their causes are extremely complex, and well-chosen interventions based on a deep and thorough systems analysis may also sometimes fail.

If this 95% were both meaningful and true, what would be the consequences for action, and what would be a reasonable target for improvement? Writing books and articles complaining about a general lack of management profundity, or the folly of "The Regime", looks suspiciously like an ineffectual meddle rather than a well-chosen intervention with a well-designed outcome. Will Deming's followers take their own medicine? See my post Easier Seddon Done.

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See also Paul Hebert on Deming and Systems in Today's Business World - No Answers Just Questions, pondering whether the 95% still applies to knowledge/software or whether a 50%/50% split would fit better (via @baob)

Consultancy as Diplomacy

In The Rules of the Game (TLS, 28 Oct 2009),  Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former ambassador to the United Nations, has written a review in praise of Satow's Diplomatic Practice, described as an "internationally acknowledged authority on the practice of diplomacy" and first published in 1917.

Is this elderly tome still relevant? Greenstock argues that it is, saying "we need to know what constitutes good practice." So I was intrigued to compare some of these snippets of best practice in diplomacy with what might be regarded as best practice in consultancy.

"To adhere to a standard formula, often during a tense situation, has a reassuringly businesslike quality to it. As with legal language, it sounds strange but it is effective."

"Listen more than you talk; stay calm in every circumstance; don’t show off that you are privy to secrets."

"A diplomat carries few weapons, but the most important of them is his or her own credibility, both with the government at home and with colleagues and sparring partners out in the field. Words have to be wisely chosen, of course; and a radical openness, while engaging, is a tactical risk. But straightforward deceit rarely pays."

Why are diplomats needed at all, in these days of modern communication and summit meetings? Greenstock is clearly convinced that professional diplomacy is an important complement to the political rough-and-tumble. "What could be more sensible and efficient than direct business between the experts concerned conducted in plain language? Someone, however, has to pull the threads together and take a strategic view." In Greenstock's opinion, that person is the professional diplomat. I know consultants who have a similarly high opinion of the consultant's unique ability to take the strategic view.

There is always the possibility of tension between diplomats and their political masters, and Greenstock gives some interesting examples where he and his peers took the initiative and went beyond their official brief. The ability to take such initiatives may be partly justified by his observation that "Experienced diplomats swimming with the flow of global events have as good a chance as anyone of spotting something better than a zero-sum game". In the same edition of TLS, there is a short article on Margaret Thatcher's German War, which reveals a mismatch between Thatcher's largely anti-German values and policy and the rather more conciliatory diplomatic activity of her officials. (Perhaps an opportunity for a VPEC-T analysis?)

Clearly consultants have something to learn from diplomacy, but is best practice enough? Comments please?