Thinking About Systems Thinking

A framework for interactive design and management

The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski

This column is a tribute primarily to Jamshid Gharajedaghi, a long-time teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. My wife Carole and I recently visited him while in Philadelphia doing a presentation for the International Society for Performance Improvement on our new book, The Transformative Workplace: Growing People, Purpose, Prosperity and Peace (Transformations Press Unltd., 2015).

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Indeed, thinking about Systems Thinking

David,

Jamshid Gharajedaghi’s Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture (1999) has been a long-time favorite. In some parts of my copy there are more yellow highlights than not. Even so, I would find it quite a challenge to contend “Dr. Deming … provided little help in being grandly innovative” and to imply he was not “a true systems thinker who also [did not] knew how to design or redesign a system.”

In his book, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, Dr. Deming offers: “What ignited Japan? The flow diagram in Figure 6 was the spark that in 1950 and onward turned Japan around. It displayed … a system of production.”

An aspect of Dr. Deming’s system of production is “Design and redesign,” as the follow-on from “Generation of ideas” and “Consumer research.”

Now, consider that a “system of production” may be a leadership system, a management system, an operations system, or a sustainment system, predominately. Then, orthogonal to the system of production is the nature of the system, ranging, say, from technical to social, from cognitive to physical, from tangible to intangible, from soft to hard, etc. Also, systems of production need not correspond to an organization chart, as systems of production are ubiquitous.

Therefore, a system of production might give rise to a “grandly innovative” design or redesign, just it might give rise to a design or redesign for “improvement.” Dr. Deming’s flow diagram display inhibits neither. And so might your usage of the term “grandly innovative” be but another term for Deming’s use of the word “spark?” And might Dr. Deming’s work with Japan be an example of “grandly innovative?”

Finally, for me, the nature of Systems Thinking varies… Deming, Ackoff, Senge, Sterman, Meadows, Gharajedaghi, Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, Kohn, Mother Teresa, and many others. Thus I take Systems Thinking as a synthesis rather than as an analysis of who did or did not do what. Moreover, it seems to me Systems Thinking is, by nature, also ubiquitous. After all, what is not a system of production?