An Introduction to the Systemic Approach

An alternative to Bureaucracy

The systemic approach is an alternative system of organisation structure, management and control to bureaucracy which is a serious obstacle in the processes of organisation change. Most of us know bureaucracy as the behaviour of bureaucratic organisations: the waste, their inflexibility, the slavish way they follow procedures, the way they resist change, the responsibility and power they bestow on the 'boss' and their openness to corruption and favour. Bureaucracy the behaviour is a product of bureaucracy the system: you can't have one without the other.

In fact the term bureaucracy is simply a description of the management system we choose to use to manage and control all our public and market sector organisations. The term bureaucracy originates from the observations of a sociologist who used the term more than a hundred years ago to describe how organisations were managed and controlled. The term simply means 'rule-by-office-holder'; we experience it as the hierarchy of managers that run the organisations that we work in or which claim to serve us today. Everything has changed since bureaucracy was first observed and described; nothing has changed since in the way we organise ourselves. Bureaucracy is based on human input: on 'jobs', the boss is boss. The systemic approach is based on the systems of knowledge-resource input that secure the functions that enable an organisation to deliver its purpose; the purpose, enabling function and the interaction of resources are boss. Bureaucracy is based on individual opinion; the systemic approach is based on undeniable fact.

Intrinsic Order

It is self-evident that a public or market sector organisation exists to deliver the purpose of the enterprise that it serves and that the inputs of the knowledge resources of the organisation combine and interact in an order intrinsic to the delivery of the purpose. The effectiveness of an organisation in delivering its purpose depends on how effectively its knowledge resources are encouraged or allowed to interact in context of its purpose and the functions that enable its delivery. Bureaucracy frustrates this essential knowledge interaction and in doing so frustrates innovation.

The functions that enable a society to deliver its purpose and remain viable are no less intrinsic: energy, clean water, economic security, mobility and so on are intrinsic to the viability of any society. A government is conceived as as the management team of an organisation in that it must ensure that the functions that enable its society to remain viable are secured and to a level consistent with the level of development of its society. There is no reason why a government should become actively involved in delivering viability functions or in stipulating how they should be delivered; delivery should rest with whoever can achieve what is required most effectively but the government is responsible for ensuring that a society remains viable.

Organisation Value

Value can be applied only to functions, in the case of organisations the functions that enable it to deliver its purpose. Logically there is an economy of purpose that optimises how functions are delivered. An organisation has value: the delivery of its purpose against how effectively it uses its resources. The resources of an organisation combine not en masse but through a structure of learning systems, discrete systems of interactive knowledge-resource inputs each of which is responsible for deciding how an equally discrete output-related functional role of the whole is delivered. Because this structure of systems is intrinsic to the purpose and viability of the functional whole, it is referred to as ‘systemic’: a given system delivers a discrete functional role; no other system can deliver the role; an improvement in a system improves the whole; failure in the system endangers the whole.

The effectiveness of a learning system depends on how effectively it exploits knowledge; on identifying the factors which impact the functional role in question and on bringing together the knowledge-sources, the learning system, capable of addressing and resolving the impact factor equation into an optimum solution for their organisation. Management leadership means ensuring that systems deliver their discrete roles by the most effective means; the management hierarchy must follow the functional (systocratic) hierarchy if leadership is to be related directly to enabling the purpose of the organisation. Bureaucracy not only fails to recognise intrinsic order it discourages inherently the coming together of interactive knowledge-resource inputs and confuses the leadership role.

Achieving and maintaining organisation value is a primary responsibility of management. The productivity, or value, of the organisation as a whole is improved incrementally when individual delivery systems learn to improve their capacity to deliver their discrete functional roles more effectively. This value improvement process is referred to as systemic learning: the organisation ‘learning’ as an organic entity to deliver its purpose in the only way it can: system-by-system.

Systemic learning is based on what is referred to as learning systems theory: each output-related enabling functional role (Figure 1) has its own unique learning system of interactive knowledge-resource inputs depending on the factors which impact the role; empowering local knowledge is critical to effective organisation change. Correctly structured and facilitated a learning system is capable of analysing the factors which impact its role, deciding how best to deliver its role at a point in time and recommending changes for management to interpret in context of the wider needs of the organisation.

The Systemic Approach

The systemic approach is not an invention of the management industry. It emerged in the nineteen sixties from a very practical project to facilitate productivity improvement. Productivity improvement, in its output-per-unit-of-input sense, was interpreted as an organisation 'learning', as an organic entity, to deliver its purpose more effectively. An organisation cannot change, 'learn', respond and adapt, as a whole; it learns when one or more of its discrete systems of interactive knowledge-resources responds to a stimulus for change and adapts what is done or the way it is done. The project showed that organisations do not change as a whole. Organisation change involves what are referred to as learning systems: systems of knowledge-resource inputs that are uniquely equipped, because of their interactive knowledge inputs, to respond and adapt to valid change stimuli on behalf of the organisation as a whole. Learning systems are intrinsic to all organisations but the interaction of knowledge they involve is frustrated by bureaucracy. Learning systems relate directly to the functions that enable an organisation to deliver its purpose and logically to improve how they choose to do it. Systemic learning as a process is the key to the control of organisation change, the means by which relevant new information, knowledge and methods are identified, evaluated, assimilated and embedded. Bureaucracy resists this essential knowledge-resource interaction by structuring on individual input rather than functional output; on jobs rather than functional integrity.

To remain viable an organisation or a society must learn routinely; it must ensure that the functions that enable it to deliver its purpose are delivered continuously to an effective level of performance. A market sector organisation that remains financially viable shows that this learning process is taking place to some extent but unless the systemic learning process is institutionalised, pursued actively, learning is taking place more often than not by default or by reaction. Systemic learning, which describes and harnesses the organisation learning process, has been developed into a practical methodology to enable and ensure that organisations are structured to learn: to respond and adapt to change routinely. It also facilitates the management of knowledge and the extensive use of e-learning to facilitate routine in-house change programmes; particularly to spread best practice.

The systemic approach involves six constants:

• the purpose of the organisation;
• the current objectives of management
• the output-related functions that enable the delivery of purpose and objectives;
• the individual functional roles that decide how to effect delivery;
• the equation of factors which impact a delivery system at a point in time;
• the learning system of interactive knowledge-resource inputs which is uniquely qualified to address and resolve the impact factor equation.

The systemic approach was a natural development of what emerged from the systemic learning productivity improvement project. Systocracy is rule-by-systemic-order. Clearly if bureaucracy is shown to resist the interaction of resources that is intrinsic to organisation change and value it must be replaced by a theory of organisation that reflects the organic, or systemic, structure: hence systocracy. In contrast to bureaucracy, systocracy comprises a tangible organisation theory and a set of tools that everyone can understand and use to move incrementally from the present chaos of bureaucracy to an order that is intrinsic to all organisations: an order which defines how it should be structured, managed and controlled to enable it to behave as the organic entity it is and to deliver its purpose by the most effective means. As an organisation change methodology systemic learning provides the means to manage and control the incremental change steps that improve the current value of the organisation, its ability to deliver its purpose more effectively here and now and to move pragmatically from a bureaucratic to a systocratic form of organisation. What is important is to avoid disturbing the existing management structure until management is convinced by the experience of the effectiveness of the systemic approach.

Systocracy simply recognises that;

• an organisation exists to bring together interactive resources to deliver the purpose of a public or private sector enterprise;
• the resources of an organisation combine and interact in an order intrinsic to the hierarchy of functions and functional roles that enable it to deliver its purpose;
• the value of an organisation depends on how effectively it uses its interactive knowledge-resources to secure the functions which enable it to deliver its purpose;
• the roles and responsibilities of the management hierarchy must correlate to the enabling functional hierarchy;
• management leadership must foster routinely the effectiveness of the functions and functional roles that ensure the delivery of the purpose of the organisation;
• management practice must facilitate routinely the systemic learning process.

Systocracy also emphasises the issue of what is often referred to loosely as joined-upness; the impact of interactive systems on other systems. Joined-upness is obviously a problem of government understanding where decisions of one ministry or department impact others and society in general. Because it involves an understanding of the interrelatedness of impact factors, the systemic approach has given rise to a simple graphic language to enable us to apprehend and discuss joined-upness and to take systemic interrelatedness into account when making decisions.

The Systemic Approach and E-learning

The origins of systemic approach date back to the nineteen sixties and the concern of the then government over Britain's 'productivity gap'. Productivity, in its output-per-unit-of-input sense, was interpreted by the writer as an organisation 'learning' to deliver its purpose more effectively today than it did yesterday; in short productivity improvement and value improvement are synonymous. Systemic learning as a change methodology emerged from a developmental research project using multimedia distance learning methods designed to evaluate the capacity of  'learning systems' to undergo self-generated productivity improvement. Initially the learning process was referred to as 'total learning' because an improvement in any enabling functional role improves the performance of the organisation in total. Distance learning methods were used to enable the learning system to respond and adapt to change without undue outside influences. The overall strategy was to produce a central source of distance learning programmes, based on a common organisation learning methodology, which could be called-off as required: a kind of OU of organisation change and value improvement.

Distance learning was used to satisfy a number of interactive elements within the systemic approach:

• to exploit the communicative power of multimedia;
• to enable an in-house strategy and facility of organisation change;
• to spread the use best practice, of techniques and technologies that were already successful elsewhere;
• to make available information and knowledge from the best sources presented by the most effective means;
• and to enable the organisations to develop and facilitate routine internal change skills.

Systemic Failure and Viability Functions

Governments are the extreme case when it comes to organisation complexity, structure, management and control. The credit crisis of 2008/9 made clear in graphic terms the real meaning of 'systemic failure'. A pillar of the social-economic fabric no longer fulfilled its functional role and the viability of society as a whole was in failure mode if not in danger of collapse. But financial collapse is only one of a multitude of ways in which the viability of a society, a nation-state, can be threatened. A government of any persuasion must be concerned because, as the credit crisis revealed, it is the last line of defence and is expected to pick up the pieces of failure. Unless governments are structured according to the threats to the viability of the societies they serve and the functions that enable them to do so they remain permanently vulnerable to the affects of systemic failure. What a government does outside these intrinsic responsibilities is a question of choice and opinion.

The Meaning of Value

The term value is all embracing: it means what you get for your money and/or effort; the performance of an organisation against resources expended. The value organisation is one that uses its knowledge-resources most effectively to enable the delivery of the purpose for which it exists. In every organisation there is an economy of purpose that needs to be liberated. Other words and phrases have been used to try to express the idea of the value organisation: total quality, lean production and organisation re-engineering. Value covers all of these concepts; value is all-embracing.

Important changes in terminology are how we define 'function' and 'system' in their relevance to organisations. Function is used in the systemic approach only to describe an enabling function of the organisation rather than the input of a person or a department of people of like skills. Function is used as in the value analysis of tangible products: for example the engine of a motor car 'provides power': a function that enables the car to deliver its purpose by combining the input of disparate but complementary parts each fulfilling its role within the enabling function as a whole. How successfully interactive technology-knowledge is exploited determines the effectiveness of the engine to deliver its enabling function and the method chosen to decide how best to deliver it. The effectiveness of an organisation depends on how successfully the car producer, for example, combines knowledge-resources to secure the functions that enable it to deliver its purpose, its product. One such enabling function is process engineering; it enables the car producer to bring together the combination of interactive knowledge-resource inputs that ensures that the car is produced as designed by the specified means: what is best for a given organisation at a given point in time.

The use of the term system is precise; it is used only to refer to the intrinsic systems of interactive knowledge-resource inputs which secure the functions and functional roles that enable the purpose of an organisation.

Systemic Learning and Knowledge Management

Any change to improve the performance of an organisation must relate to the functions that enable it to deliver its purpose. Systemic learning is about the effective use and empowerment of knowledge from any source in context of an enabling function or functional role and its discrete contribution in delivering the purpose of the whole. The systemic learning project enables management not only to bring existing knowledge-resources to bear on current issues but also to review and analyse the knowledge base of their organisation and to make adjustments in the knowledge-resources available to it.

The systemic learning event:

• questions tacit knowledge in respect of why things are done the way they are;
• liberates latent information, knowledge and skills;
• reveals the current levels of knowledge and skills relevant to particular knowledge-resource inputs of a valid functional role;
• identifies the individuals who hold the relevant knowledge and skills;
• reveals shortfalls in the information, knowledge and skills bases of individual knowledge-resource inputs;
• identifies the individuals whose knowledge and skills need to be upgraded;
• identifies additional knowledge needs;
• evaluates new knowledge for its relevance to current needs;
• translates new knowledge into applicable knowledge;
• embeds new and upgraded knowledge and skills immediately into revised processes, practices and procedures;
• tests the leadership attributes and calibre of individuals driving projects;
• links education and training directly to the current organisational development strategy;
• provides information for planning other education and training activities.

The Tools of the Systemic Approach

The law of the situation demands that the chief executive of an organisation ensures that the functions that enable an organisation to deliver its purpose are delivering viability at all times by the most effective means. Bureaucracy provides the chief executive with no tools s/he can use to structure, manage and control an organisation to ensure what must happen does happen routinely other than the authority of his or her position as 'the boss'. Man did not escape from the cave because he had ideas or opinions but because he had tools.

Systocracy replaces the 'rule by office holder' of bureaucracy with a theory of organisation based on the law of the situation: the order in which its knowledge-resources combine and interact in systems to enable it to deliver its purpose. It ensures that those directly involved in the core processes and skills of an organisation have a common perception of the precise purpose and objectives of their organisation, the functions that enable them to be delivered and the means to apply knowledge resources to best effect.

Systarchy describes a management hierarchy that mirrors the functional hierarchy; to ensure what must happen does happen. The domain of any individual 'manager' must involve responsibility for ensuring the delivery of an organic or systemic part of the whole. The implication being that the systemic manager has a leadership role, a responsibility to ensure that a particular enabling functional role is delivered, and by implication by the most effective means.

Systemic Learning is the key to the systemic approach. Organisations cannot change as a whole. All organisation change is the result of systemic learning as first this system and then that improves its capacity to deliver its functional role more effectively. Systemic learning as a methodology provides the means to harness immediately the intrinsic systemic order to improve organisation value here and now while moving the organisation incrementally from a bureaucratic to an organic or systemic form of understanding. Systemic learning as a means to control the organisation change process requires no alteration to current management structures or methods until management decides otherwise.

Learning Systems are the systems of interactive knowledge-resources that are, or at least should be, involved intrinsically in solving input factor equations, in recommending how an organisation should respond and adapt to an organisation change stimulus that affects their functional role. To be fully effective a change in how a systemic function is enabled must take into account all of the factors that impact the function and its effective delivery. All organisation change involves an impact factor equation which must be addressed and resolved by those involved if a function or functional role is to be enabled by the most effective means. The relevant learning system must comprise the combination of knowledge-resource inputs capable of addressing fully and resolving the impact factor equation to best effect. Learning systems involve and empower but only to recommend in context of the needs and wider purpose of the organisation as a whole.

Systemic Learning and E-Learning An organisation can improve its value only by learning how to deliver its purpose more effectively: with less effort and/or at lower cost in resources expended. The logical means to effect this change is to provide the relevant learning system, which controls how a function is delivered, with the means to investigate, evaluate, recommend and finally embed the changes relevant to a given organisation without unnecessary and undue outside influence. Organisation learning is not simply a question of knowing but of doing: evaluating, recommending and embedding some form of material change resulting in an improvement in performance. My background in the engineering industry and with knowledge of the power of correctly prepared multimedia programmes allied to an interest in organisation change dating back to my teens suggested to me that knowledge could be prepared in distance learning form for communication directly into the active systemic learning process. The need for a learning methodology to enable a learning system to plough its own furrow, guided but not directly influenced, was considered a critical component of the method. It is important to stress that e-learning cannot be used directly to effect organisation change through a bureaucratic hierarchy.

(Note I make no apologies for putting forward a concept which runs counter to the present currency of ideas. One thing is certain we cannot face the future with confidence until we replace bureaucracy,)

Copyright © 2010 Kevin J. Nixon
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