Target Patients & Intentional Cultures — Got Systemic Solutions?
March 6th, 2007
When I would see clients in therapy, it was almost daily someone would bring in their child, telling me how they were broken. Everything from, “Suzy refused to go to school”, to “Billy is tearing this family apart”. The same thing seems to happen in organizations. “Susan in marketing doesn’t do her job”, or “William in holding our department back”. Inevitably, I find, in Organizations as well as families, these “Target Patients” more often than not turn out to be a symptom of some deeper systemic problem…
Eilliott Jacuqes popularized the idea of “requisite organization”. It’s not a new concept — but, it’s a critical one. The idea is this — almost every problem of organizational dysfunction isn’t the result of deficient employees, but instead can be traced to some systemic problem(s).
What’s a Systemic Problem?
It’s becoming, I think, more and more understood that we, as human beings, create the environment we live in. Indeed, the best and brightest among us seem to do this the most powerfully. These above-average people see the world with a vision, and they use their personal power to bring this vision into the world. This is as true of great political and religious leaders like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as it is of the most exceptional business CEOs like Steve Jobs or Jack Welch, changing the social reality in which they live.
What is less discussed is the way in which the social reality we live in, changes us. The most common way in which this gets discussed these days in organizational leadership and management training seems to be in the concept of ‘culture’. However, too often, culture is talked about vaguely, as something that has to do with casual Fridays and pictures of the founder in the lobby. While these things are important, and may sometimes work, culture is a much too important thing to leave to chance.
Intentional Cultures — How to Create Systemic Solutions
The key is making culture concrete. Eilliot Jacques talked extensively about how we can do this — things like making sure there’s a match between employee ability and job, management structure, and most imporantly defining the managerial leaderhip process clearly. The point is that culture is simple — culture is, I believe, what you choose to reward.
Organizations could save lots of money on wasted employee time, training and re-training, leadership speakers, and management workshops that don’t have a lasting impact if they would do one thing. That thing — develop a clear system. Until now, no one has made the process of developing a clear system strait forward and systematic.
If you want to learn more about a systematic approach to organizational development that’s saving organizations lots of money, and actually working systematically check out the Execution Boost Support System
Article Filed under: Business Excellence, Personal Effectiveness
Thanks for talking about the systems we live and work in. It is so easy to think in terms of the individual as if this mythic man or woman was battling the system. it is the clasic cowboy movie theme. And a powerful theme for those of us who grew up in America. It is romantic, heroic, and usually wrong. I think it is healthier to look at the individual as apart of the system. So instead of looking at Burt’s performance problems, we look at the system he operates in. Suddenly we see Burt’s performance for what it is and we can better judge where the problems come from and whetre the solutions might lie. And with this wide-angle lens it allows us to see Burt’s contribution to the problem in perspective.