A Systems Approach to Organization Development

A system is a set of things — people, cells, molecules, or whatever — interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. — Donella H. Meadows. Thinking in Systems: A Primer

A high-performing company can feel like a finely-tuned sports car racing toward its destination.

And a struggling company can feel like you are stuck by the side of the road, desperately trying to understand what’s broken and how to fix it.

But companies are not cars — and your fix can’t be mechanical.

Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist and research fellow at MIT who contributed much to the science of systems theory when it was still quite young. She’s also one of the most influential thinkers in my life, up there with W. Edwards Deming, Taichi Ohno, and Don Reinertsen.

Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems should be required reading for anyone leading an organization because it sheds so much light on what’s really going on in a system (e.g. your organization).

Systems are collections of elements arranged in ways that produce patterns of behavior over time. Imagine holding a slinky by the top-most ring in one hand while cradling the bottom with your other. If you move your bottom hand, the slinky will bounce to the floor and then back into the air.

Now imagine melting the slinky down, casting it into a solid cube, and then trying to move your hands in the same way. The molecules are the same, but the arrangement is different. The cube and the slinky will react very differently to identical stimuli.

This is the key insight that Meadows gave us; When we arrange component parts in different ways, we create systems with different inherent properties.

Your organization is not a sports car, and treating it like one will keep you stranded. It is a living, breathing system. It doesn’t need mechanical fixes. It needs strengthening and optimization.

But how do we fix or improve a system? Meadows can help.

In her seminal article Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (I revisit it several times each year and always find new insights), she points out that there are better and worse places to make changes in a system. Here are five of the top areas she recommends we intervene:

• The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.

• The goals of the system.

• The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.

• The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, and constraints).

• The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).

Systems can be very sensitive to even small changes — sometimes called “the butterfly effect.” By making tiny adjustments to any one of these leverage points, you can sometimes radically change the nature of the system.

Your organization is a system. If you want to make it more resilient or enable its growth, these are great places to start thinking about making changes.

I focus my work on leadership teams because the leverage points are usually in their sphere of control. If we get the leadership team right, we can create a company that is efficient, effective, resilient, and able to grow.

Working with changeforce.ai, I offer four proprietary programs that take a systems approach to organizational development:

• Effective Leadership Teams,

• Effective Functional Teams,

• Zero-based Org Design, and

• Transformation.

We also offer a 30-45 day deep-dive assessment to help you understand where exactly to intervene in your system.

If you're feeling stranded by the side of the road, or just like you're not moving as fast as you could, it could be time for a shift in mindset.

Ready for the journey? Then reach out and set up a conversation.

— Bob Gower

PS We've helped companies like Spotify, Wikimedia, Zoom, Charles Schwab, General Assembly, and many more improve their systems. We’d be honored to add you to this list. Keep an eye out for a free learning session that we are planning in September.

PPS Please vote for my proposed session “Building Cult-Like Cultures” for next year’s SXSW. It will be a huge help in getting my work in front of more people.