The greatest promise of the systemic perspective is the unification of knowledge across all specialties, since the same archetypes are repeated in biology, psychology, family therapy, economics, social sciences, ecology, and business administration. Mark Paich
What is systemic management?
Management is an English word that comes from the verb manage, it means to drive.
It appeared in the late 16th century, probably derived from the Italian maneggiare, which means to handle. Its true meaning is therefore deeper than simply directing.
Peter F. Drucker, one of the founding fathers of modern management theory, author of The Practice of Management, The Management of the Future, Challenges of Management in the 21st Century, argued, at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this, that much of what is taught and practiced in this area is out of date, wrong, or both.
He believed that to remain competitive - and even to survive - companies will have to move from linear thinking to a systemic perspective in order to face the increasingly complex and changing reality.
This consideration introduces us to systemic management. Later, with Peter M Senge, professor at MIT and author of The Fifth Discipline, we have been proving that it is necessary for organizations to learn to create the results that matter to them in a generative way.
We believe that the organizations that will be able to compete in the new realities are those that discover how to harness the potential for learning and enthusiasm of people at all levels of their structures. This is the development of systemic management.
And, for this, personal knowledge, personal learning is necessary but not sufficient. Individuals can know many or learn constantly, and yet there is no organizational learning.
Teams need to learn. If teams learn, they are like microorganisms that transmit learning throughout the organization.
In this way, organizations become agents of their own changes and are capable of managing any type of crisis, recognizing threats, discovering new opportunities and making them more sustainable.
Coaching system for learning systemic management
In everyday use, learning management has become synonymous with acquiring knowledge and skills. Drucker himself together with John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The New Industrial State, were great promoters of knowledge management and technostructure.
Instead, the true learning of systemic management must get to the bottom of what it means to be human in a changing and interrelated world like the one we are living in. People, teams and organizations, no matter how much knowledge they have, must be open to continuous and permanent learning.
Pierre Wack, planning director of the Royal Dutch Shell's group, discovered that planning tasks in management were no longer just about producing a documented vision of the future, but that it was necessary to create scenarios for managers to question their models of reality and learn to change them when necessary. This is reinforced by the criteria of Chris Argyris, author of Action Science and professor at Harvard Business School, who says verbatim: “ Mental models determine not only the way of interpreting the world, but the way of acting. We get stuck in defensive routines that isolate our mental models from any examination, and consequently we develop unqualified competence ”.
With all these contributions, we have experienced that coaching with a systemic perspective is the best system for learning systemic management. With it we can train ourselves to undertake, lead and manage what really matters to us and, thus, expand our capacity to create in a complex and changing reality. For coaching with a systemic perspective, learning for survival is not enough. Adaptive learning must be combined with generative learning. Learning that increases results and people's satisfaction.
Coaching with a systemic perspective goes beyond adapting to change. It addresses the most effective way to govern it successfully, which is to create it. We can learn to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat.
It is possible to train yourself to feel part of a creative process that can be influenced without unilaterally controlling it. It is very efficient for systemic management to become an agent of change and achieve sustainable results.
In any learning, the approach with a systemic perspective is more necessary today than ever because complexity overwhelms us:
- We have the capacity to create more information than anyone can absorb. Interdependence is being encouraged that is very difficult to manage. It is also very difficult to keep up with the speed of the changes we are driving. This escalation of complexity is unprecedented in our entire history.
The complexity can be of two types: the dynamics and the detail with many varieties.
The dynamic complexity occurs because the systems change occurs on different time scales and these scales sometimes interact. In dynamic complexity, cause and effect are not close in time or space.
You can only understand the effects of a storm by looking at its elements in their entirety. You will never understand if you do it individually.
All these events are separated in space and time. But they are all connected. Each one influences the rest. Although, many times, this influence is not evident. The same is true in any organization and in all personal, social, business and ecological behaviors. The invisible frames act interrelated and can take time to produce mutual effects. As we ourselves are part of this warp, it is very difficult for us to see the patterns of change. We tend to focus on isolated parts of the system. We see only snapshots. In this way most of our deepest problems are not resolved.
The systemic perspective offers us a conceptual framework where the total patterns are clearer, it helps us modify them and see, at the same time, the parts and their subtle interrelations.
The systemic perspective is a very powerful tool to deal with dynamic complexity and, therefore, for systemic management.
The complexity of details makes all rational explanations incomplete. Human systems are very complex. We cannot fully understand them. There are enough experiences that we have "cognitive limitations." Our conscious mind can only address a small number of variables at a time.
The complexity of details is resolved in the unconscious. This is what we call the inner game of coaching.
When the conscious shifts the burden of a task to the unconscious, it takes over and becomes automatic, natural. This frees the conscious mind to focus on dynamic complexity.
When Messi sees the ball coming, his conscious mind only allows him to see how to tackle the goal. It is your unconscious mind that guides you to automatically overcome all the obstacles that stand in your way.
I invite you to remember how you learned to drive, use the computer keyboard, walk, talk… For a two-year-old child, placing the soup spoon in his mouth may be a very complex task… On the other hand, when he has learned it he does it without thinking.
The unconscious is programmed with experience. Cultures and beliefs program the unconscious. Language does too, and it has very subtle effects.
But how have we taught the unconscious to structure information?
It is not easy to describe feedback processes with our usually linear language. We usually give up on it. But this changes when we begin to dominate the systems perspective. The unconscious is subtly reeducated to structure the data. It happens like when we learn a foreign language.
The unconscious mind encompasses much more detail than our conscious mind.
The unconscious mind is not limited by the number of feedback processes that it can examine as it happens to the conscious mind. Thus, dynamic complexity and detail complexity can be integrated. This is the purpose of systemic perspective coaching for systemic management learning.
