5 Systems thinking
Martin - is this the correct title for this newly created section?The chapter by Reynolds and Holwell describes four different attempts to group traditions of systems thinking according to the relative emphasis given to the situation, the users, and the ideas underpinning the approach.
Activity 7 Four perspectives on systems thinking
Read the section ‘Perspectives on systems thinking’ in Introducing systems approaches [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (section 1.3.3). Draw up a table contrasting each of the four perspectives on systems thinking. For each perspective note the relative emphasis given to the:
- a.situation of use
- b.practitioner or user of particular systems approaches.
Discussion
The act of classifying ideas is itself dependent on the perspective of the person or people doing the classifying. Each of the four perspectives on the range of systems ideas provides an emphasis on either the situation in which the ideas were generated or on the individual practitioners or community of practitioners generating the ideas. Sometimes a classification of ideas may rely on more or less equal emphasis on both the situation and the practitioner.
Making strategy, like systems thinking, involves dealing with situations often comprising many variables and with often contrasting perspectives held by different practitioners. In the late 1990s Henry Mintzberg, a well-known writer on management theory and strategic thinking, with his colleagues Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel, attempted to make sense of the plethora of strategy-making approaches (Mintzberg et al., 1998). Firstly, using ideas from Chaffee, they identified seven common areas of agreement on strategy (Mintzberg et al., 1998, p. 16). These are listed below, where I have added in brackets an indication of whether the area emphasises attention to variables, which are associated with situations, or perspectives, which are associated with practitioners:
- strategy concerns both organisation and environment (perspectives)
- the substance of strategy is complex (variables)
- strategy affects overall welfare of the organisation (perspectives)
- strategy involves issues of both content and process (variables)
- strategies are not purely deliberate (perspectives)
- strategies exist on different levels (variables)
- strategy involves thought processes (perspectives).
The seven can therefore be divided between two groups. The first group, formed by the three areas 2, 4 and 6, relates more to engaging with multiple variables. The second group, formed by the four areas 1, 3, 5 and 7, relates to areas engaging with perspectives.
Next, Mintzberg and his colleagues classified all the approaches to strategy making they could find according to two sets of criteria:
- how each viewed the external world, ranging from being comprehensible and controllable to being unpredictable and confusing, with a focus on situations
- what internal process was proposed, ranging from the deliberate rational process to the less-deliberate natural process, with a focus on practitioners and their ideas.
A clue to the value of systems thinking is given by Mintzberg himself:
We are all like the blind men and the strategy process is our elephant. Everyone has seized some part or other of the animal and ignored the rest. Consultants have generally gone for the tusks, while academics have preferred to take photo safaris, reducing the animal to a static two dimensions. As a consequence, managers have been encouraged to embrace one narrow perspective or another, like the glories of planning or the wonders of core competences. Unfortunately, the process will only work for them when they deal with the entire beast, as a living organism.
Perspectives on making strategy clearly need a wider picture. It is not that particular perspectives are necessarily wrong but only that they are necessarily limited.
The relative focus of attention on situations and practitioners expressed by different approaches can be translated in relation to asking questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ respectively. What is the purpose of the given strategic issue in any given situation, and how might it be achieved by practitioners? The framing of these questions is undoubtedly important, particularly with respect to situations where there are a multitude of variables and purposes for dealing with them.
So questions on strategy in the twenty-first century are also more concerned with questions of ‘why’. Why are there so many unintended consequences of human action? Why did the global financial crises of 2008–09 happen? Why the crises of confidence in societal and organisational governance? Why can societies, organisations and people not be more ecologically benign? In short, why can people not think systemically about alleviating the multitude of economic, social and ecological issues?
Monocausal explanations are sometimes favoured by managers and politicians either in order to mobilise action or as a way of demonstrating that a presumed single cause is being addressed. Making strategy requires looking at multiple causes through multiple lenses. It is this particular territory of complexity when navigating through multiple causation in messy contexts where strategic thinking of whatever school might be served through systems thinking in practice. Addressing ‘why’ questions requires examining the purposive boundaries of systems that have generated systemic failure, whilst creatively designing more purposeful boundaries of systems to actively improve situations of interest.