Thought Leadership

We were asked to answer the question of why people should consider Systems Thinking as an approach to viewing organisations and their issues; in less that 2 pages of A4.  This is what we came up with as a summary.

The Current View

The most common form of organisational design is a functional hierarchy i.e.

In additional to the functional view many, if not most, organisations also overlay a set of process diagrams e.g.

A process view of an organisation shows how individual transactions pass through the organisation.  A process view provides a better management model than functional view in that it more accurately reflects how value flows into and around an organisation and allows that value to be measured more accurately.  However, as many organisations have found, mapping processes in detail (and keeping them up to date) is a time-consuming and difficult task.

More importantly, process mapping struggles to represent important areas of activity such as marketing, innovation and risk management that everyone knows can add significant value to an organisation.  This is primarily because they are not “transactional” activities.

Not being able to accurately model, and therefore be able to measure, key areas of value of an organisation are a root cause of very current and real problems and provide a real issue for all stakeholders in an organisation e.g. stock market value is fundamentally linked to innovation and marketing but putting a value on them includes more subjectivity than anyone is prepared to admit.

A “Systems” or Cybernetic View

To get a more holistic view we make the statement that “everything is connected” and look to bring in some of the key influences we know are not in the basic process.

The picture above is an influence map showing what we already know about any sale, they are influenced by references from existing customers and these references are, in turn influenced by the experience of that product or service.  It is also obvious that a sale is also influenced by the market profile.  Government regulation is an influence through competition policy and employment rules.  Government is in turn influenced by taxes.

The point is that even a basic systems view is a more complete representation of how an organisation operates and is interconnected with its environment.  It is immediately easier to identify why issues arise, where the right place to intervene is and what the consequences of any intervention might be.

Types of Systems Thinking

There are a variety of different types of systems thinking.  The widest known are the simple haemostats popularised by Peter Senge in his book “The 5^th Discipline”.  The influence diagram concept has been extended and formularised by people such as Ackoff and Checkland (soft systems modelling).  These are all useful at the “detail” level of analysis.

At an overall organisational level there is the Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM).  This describes any organisation as a set of 5 types of system which all need to be present for the organisation to be sustainable (viable).  It is particularly interesting in that it has been proved / developed from both mathematical theory and biological observation.

I’ve been musing (and occasionally ranting) about the procurement process over the last few months and have finally started writing a white paper on the topic.  Some of the issues were brought into sharp relief by two conversations yesterday.

On one hand I was talking to a prospective client where he highlighted that one of the questions with DSDM is “How do you procure system development services from a 3rd party when the features / requirements of that system are either not fully understood and / or expected to change”. He then went on to highlight the issue of which party is taking what risks.

This is one of the core tenets of traditional / competitive / confrontational procurement: in theory the procuring party is transferring risk to the supplier. In reality this is not the case as the lawyers and commercial people in the supplier are typically more expert in assessing the risks and making sure that their organisation does not accept more risk than necessary. This is because they deal with the area of expertise in focus all the time, where for the customer it may be the first or infrequent purchase of its type.

I don’t yet have a complete answer for this question and I know this is something the DSDM community is looking at more generally. What we are looking for is a model for collaborative procurement; so meeting one of the key principles of DSDM. By definition, this could be seen to be the polar opposite of traditional procurement.

I then went to meet one of the people that I have asked to quote for re-branding and re-vamping the Kubernetes website. Again by its very nature the output of a branding exercise is unknown at the start, there is likely to be a known process but being definite about how long it will take and how much it will cost is difficult.

What did I do? Lapse straight back into a competitve procurement mindset! It was only on the train home I realised the hypocritical hole I had fallen into.

So today’s task is to work out how to procure my re-brand collaboratively….. or at least to accept my latent hypocrisy!

I had a very interesting conversation with Arthur op den Brouw, Creative Director of Designation about business values and how they relate to an organisation’s brand. Arthur’s key assertion is that an organisation’s values are the ones they actually take action on, rather than what they might have decided in a executive meeting.

This problem is that if the “values in use” are different to the “espoused values” then brand positioning, general marketing and even sales suffer as the customer’s experience is different to the expectations that have been set. There is a particular problem in that branding is very much about the intuitive part of the brain rather than the rational and so a customer, partner or employee that sees espoused brand values not being acted on in practice will typically have a negative emotional response; potentially destructive to the organisation.

In short, do what you say you are going to do; or at least be honest about who you really are!

Updated 13th Feb

The presentations this morning convinced me that test driven development is the way to go at an engineering level.  Not only does it provide a way of flushing out the  detailed requirements, it minimises the risks of defects in the final product.  The only challenge is that to do it properly needs automated test tools and they seem to have finally matured with opensource products like Fitnesse competing with commercial alternatives.  It was really quite uplifting.

Updated eve 12th Feb from the conference

Interesting day in a number of ways, not least of which was UNICOM’s laptop deciding to hibernate about 2/3rds of the way through Steve and I’s session. Hopefully we managed to cope OK even though I filled the gap with part of my standard rant about risk and procurement (it will appear here at some point soon, really).

The final presentation is here UNICOM NPWD Final Presentation

The best quote was from Chris Ambler Head of QA for Electronic Arts when referring to testing a 1st person shooter game. He was taken to task for not testing all the scenarios in a game after an obscure one crashed the server; his comment “How can you completely test something that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to fight back”. The important point is that in complex systems (all systems in reality) not every scenario can be tested.

I had a couple of very interesting conversations at evening drinks. One was with Peter Measey about the difference between a project and a programme. He insisted that a a programme was a group of connected projects that deliver business benefits; effectively a “change programme” that does not have a proscribed end. My position was that, in the agile world, the whole focus of projects is on business benefit and change and shouldn’t a change programme have measurable end in the same way as projects? If you accept this then surely a programme is the “macro-project” that all the other projects are “workstreams” from. More to come here as well I think.

The other conversation was about the difference between project management and project facilitation which I need more time to digest.

Monday 11th February

I am presenting a case study of the National Packaging Waste Database project with Steve Watkins of the Environment Agency tomorrow at this UNICOM conference. Wish me luck!

I’ll try and blog from there as well as there are some other interesting looking presentations.

I was at the Agile Business Conference earlier in the month and Christopher Avery gave a very thought provoking presentation.

His core mission in life is to teach people about taking responsibility. He has spent most of his career working with team and leadership development and noticed that while all the leadership guru’s say that the first thing a leader must do is “take responsibility” none of them say how. In his research he found papers from psychologists that had looked at the process that we all go through when we hit a problem.

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