How 'politics' and 'culture' explain-away system ignorance

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This post is about

What it means for an organisation to be system-aware.

The provocative bit

We have neither sufficient signals nor cognitive bandwidth to process how the complex system of the organisation created a certain output, and so we use macro, magical, hand-wave labels such as ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ to explain-away what happened.

The thing you can do

Make space to surface signals from your system of work.

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In my intro post to Joyous Work, I shared a belief:

I believe the majority of root causes that make work less joyous and less effective are due to insufficient understanding of the organisation as a complex system, which makes it difficult to propose and implement changes that are system-aware.

In response, I was asked a good question on LinkedIn - “What’s “system-awareness”? Have you seen it done well anywhere?”

A system is just a bunch of stuff that interacts; traffic lights, rainforests, computers, and economies are systems. The world is a system of systems.

I think humans are pretty great at building system awareness. Our brains will observe what happens to A when it interacts with B. If we see that same interaction repeatedly, we consider that ‘how the world works’ as a system. As we observe more (or learn from others), we build on that understanding, and ‘how the world works’ becomes a series of immensely nuanced interconnected interactions. I suggest an accumulation of this is what we often refer to as wisdom, and why wisdom is so often associated with experience (and failure).

So the brain is a great tool for building system awareness, but it has limits. The most notable here is when the system gets big.

There are two types of big systems. The first is a ‘complicated’ system, it has lots of components but they don’t change much and interact in predictable ways. An Airbus A380 is a complicated system, it has more than four million components but they don’t change much, and their interactions are stable and predictable (thankfully). The second is a ‘complex’ system, it has lots of components, they often change, components die, new ones emerge, and their interactions are unpredictable. The modern organisation is a complex system. It might have a bunch of complicated systems within it (e.g. production line, payroll system) but the organisation itself is complex.

When an organisation is small, it is feasible for one person (often a founder) to receive sufficient signals from the system of work, process them, and to make changes[1]. As the organisation scales - more people, more interactions - one person cannot be across enough signals, and even if they could, they would not have enough cognitive bandwidth to process it all, the task starts to become intractable.

Rather than acknowledge this and ask, “how do we ensure we continue to have sufficient, high-quality signals about our system of work and how do we process them,” leaders of scaling organisations default to norms of domain fragmentation, hierarchies, absolute targets, and other command & control mechanisms; these give a comforting feeling, but suppress and contort signals from the system of work. Even if top management wants to improve the system of work, it lacks system awareness. It does not have sufficient understanding of how the organisation works, and so it cannot be the ‘system sage’ the founder once was. I argue this issue is endemic in modern organisations.

When I look at an organisation as a complex system, I look for the ‘juice’ (positives for work) and ‘junk’ (negatives for work). Juice might be ultra-clear priorities at an individual level, junk might be relentless interruptions. I argue that due to a lack of system awareness - having neither sufficient signals nor sufficient cognitive bandwidth to process how the complex system created this juice or junk - we find it difficult or impossible to explain, and so we use macro, magical, hand-wave labels such as ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ to explain-away what happened. And when we want to change some of the junk, the best we can do is point to the junk and say “Hey team, we all need to do better on that,” and then nothing changes as it is an output of the system, not individual capabilities or behaviour.

It is very, very difficult to improve a system that you don’t understand. The organisation is a complex system that is always changing, and so you need an always-on means of listening to the signals it is giving. Even if people engagement surveys asked the right questions (they do not), they are far too infrequent. Although having better system awareness is not enough to have a better system of work, it is a prerequisite. It is the place to start. The thing you can do today is to make space to surface signals from your system of work. Good team leaders reading this will reflect, “I am already doing this within my team everyday.” So then, who is doing it for the organisation?

The second part of the question about system awareness was, “Have you seen it done well anywhere?” The answer is, absolutely yes. The pioneering work of others has refined and reinforced a way of building system awareness that offers a compelling starting point. And it is important enough that it deserves its own post. Stay tuned!

- John

[1] Check out “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson for a wealth of examples of how they have done this for their business, Basecamp, including introducing ‘To Don’t’ lists to stop task proliferation, and introducing positive friction into meeting scheduling to ensure the need warrants the effort.