Thursday, February 19, 2015

The System Thinking of the Business

'Balance and harmony' are not fixed, they are flowing.

We are at the inflection point of digitalization, the business and the world as a whole has become hyper-connected, interdependent and over-complex because the world itself is a system, which means that any view of the world that is not based on the world being a system - must be inaccurate. But what’s the system view of the world?




The systems thinker looks at their business as being part of a larger system, the socio-economic system: It is part of a larger system - the natural environment. The systems thinker understands that the purpose of their business is to serve the purpose of its containing system. Yes, a business needs to make a profit, just as a human needs to respirate, but that is not their purpose. Their very purpose is to create customers and achieve multi-dimensional business values which include both customers’ value, shareholders’ value, and social value as well.


Sensitivity to 'emergence': A systems thinker solves each unforeseen problem as it arises. Solutions are made from a much broader and encompassing view that is not possible in linear thinking. It is both detail and the big picture. Because the ability of the collection-as-a-cooperative-whole to have modes of operation using conventional or linear thinking is sometimes difficult to find viable solutions to some vexing problems. Such problems can often appear to be unsolvable or only very imperfectly. One can never be certain of their predictions or what may come tomorrow. A systems view of the world encompasses the impacts and consequences of one's thinking and actions. Interconnections and interdependencies are distinguished, wise choices and decisions are made, and actions are taken, with the resulting transformations in the world.


'Balance and harmony' are not fixed, they are flowing: There are systemic consequences and impacts of thinking and actions in terms of interconnections and interdependencies. As the system’s intrinsically continuous and contiguous developmental flow keeps being mediated through these granular media, the feedback loops that run both information (system-knowing) and transformation (system-changing) keep proliferating while also accelerating the rate of self-transformation. Thus, all of the damage arising through the distributed human subfunction of the system is produced by the misinterpretation of the system’s intrinsic fluid and organic development through these psycho-social granular media. To overcome the corruptive influence of this interfacing, the system needs to be able to comprehend oneself whole, visually, as through an integral working model of the system and its perpetual and proliferating feedback loops.


Systems thinking offers the possibility of generating a variety of options for dealing with such vexing problem situations. The mechanism consists primarily of looking at problem form as many perspectives as possible. cognition of the hierarchical nature of sub-systems and super-system. Systems thought means, at a minimum:
* focusing on relationships between things rather than characteristics of things
* Reusing conventional or linear thinking; it is sometimes difficult to find viable solutions to some vexing problems. Such problems can often appear to be unsolvable or only be tackled very imperfectly.


The system thinking and views of the business world are more balanced and it is sensitive to the emergent factors; it keeps flowing, from valley deep to mountain top; from the small river into the sea; it generates the variety of options to deal with complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty of the digital world.









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