The Inconvenience of Systems Thinking
Our modern culture is partly bureaucratic and mechanized, but a lot of our embedded mechanisms are woefully outmoded and dysfunctional. And the political side of our systems of governance are often even more dysfunctional than the ossified bureaucracies.
So here comes system thinkers to the rescue. Let's model our dysfunctional systems, let's get to the root of the problem. Let's solve the system models for ethical best practices and publish our systems theoretic models, our insightful analyses, and our innovative recommended practices for advancing to a high-functioning 21st Century system architecture.
And then we wait for the proprietors of the obsolescent, anachronistic, and dysfunctional systems to shout, "Hurrah! We are saved!"
But the "Hurrah!" never comes. And so we become frustrated and exasperated. Why is our work languishing unattended, unappreciated, and unadopted?
And then the answer smacks us in the forehead. Because all those proprietors of the current systems worry that if we fix the problems at their root, they will be out of a job. Their livelihood has been attending to the messes of our current system, and if we eradicate the messes at their source, they won't have any messes to mop up. What they really wanted was a better mop, but we foolishly proposed solutions that would eliminate the need for any mopping at all.
And so they dither and delay and put off the day of approval and adoption of innovative upgrades that would put them out of job. And those of us who have long labored to analyze, model, and propose innovative solutions are left in a state of frustration, exasperation, discombobulation, disillusionment, chagrin, cynicism, and despair.
And that, I reckon, is why Nora Bateson, Peter Jones, Derek Cabrera, and Benjamin P Taylor are discussing this on Zoom/YouTube these days.
So here comes system thinkers to the rescue. Let's model our dysfunctional systems, let's get to the root of the problem. Let's solve the system models for ethical best practices and publish our systems theoretic models, our insightful analyses, and our innovative recommended practices for advancing to a high-functioning 21st Century system architecture.
And then we wait for the proprietors of the obsolescent, anachronistic, and dysfunctional systems to shout, "Hurrah! We are saved!"
But the "Hurrah!" never comes. And so we become frustrated and exasperated. Why is our work languishing unattended, unappreciated, and unadopted?
And then the answer smacks us in the forehead. Because all those proprietors of the current systems worry that if we fix the problems at their root, they will be out of a job. Their livelihood has been attending to the messes of our current system, and if we eradicate the messes at their source, they won't have any messes to mop up. What they really wanted was a better mop, but we foolishly proposed solutions that would eliminate the need for any mopping at all.
And so they dither and delay and put off the day of approval and adoption of innovative upgrades that would put them out of job. And those of us who have long labored to analyze, model, and propose innovative solutions are left in a state of frustration, exasperation, discombobulation, disillusionment, chagrin, cynicism, and despair.
And that, I reckon, is why Nora Bateson, Peter Jones, Derek Cabrera, and Benjamin P Taylor are discussing this on Zoom/YouTube these days.
The Inconvenience of Systems Thinking
Nora Bateson, Peter Jones, Derek Cabrera, Benjamin P Taylor
posted by Moulton | 6:38 AM
3 Comments:
Benjamin P Taylor writes, "Barry Kort, these feel like points you are trying to make about someone (I’m guessing you? Or us?) and to someone? Can you give some context please? I’ve rarely seen such a scheme fully worked out that wouldn’t have caused more trouble than the original problem - or with a feasible implementation plan."
To which I reply:
The remarks are based on my experience as a Member of Technical Staff in the Network Planning Division of AT&T Bell Labs back in the 1970s and 1980s.
The managers at AT&T would become aware of some recurring problem in the operational management of the domestic telephone network. They would kick the issue over to Bell Labs to analyze the problem and recommend a solution. From time to time, I would be assigned to research some issue and provide a carefully crafted resolution.
Typically, I would spend 6 to 9 months studying the problem, constructing an applicable system model that reproduced the issue, and solving the model for best practices to eliminate the problem at hand.
Although my direct management at Bell Labs — my Supervisor and Department Head — understood and approved of my work and signed off on my report, it took an inordinate amount of time to convey our results back to the management at AT&T, enable them to understand and accept our work, and to approve the implementation of our recommendations.
It typically took three times as long to sell our findings to AT&T management as it took to study the issue and develop a functional solution in the first place.
This phenomenon perplexed me, until I realized that the most recalcitrant members of the AT&T team that had assigned us the network planning problems in the first place were the lowest ones on the totem-pole — the "janitors" who had been mopping up the messes for which they had sought our help in the first place. And so the management hierarchy at AT&T would dither and delay until they could find new job assignments for the lowest level individuals who would be out of a job as soon as our solutions were implemented into the Bell System.
The Speech-to-Text Transcript can be found here.
I don't fully understand any system however, It would be great to link up with these system thinkers to discuss Links-Plus
Post a Comment
<< Home