Systems Thinking and Radical Quality*
In order to embrace Radical Quality, we must have an understanding of how systems function, how they change, and how they resist change. Systems theory applies to all organizations in all settings. (1)
What are Systems?
A system is any set of interacting units that have some relationships among them. The component parts are often called subsystems. Each subsystem is constrained by or dependent on, the other parts of the system. On a microscopic scale, an amoeba is a system. It has smaller subsystems which must function together for the health of the overall system. On a larger scale, the human body is a system. It has smaller subsystems, such as the respiratory system and the immune system. If any of these subsystems does not function, the health of the larger system is at risk. On an even larger scale, a family functions as a system in which the actions of each family member impact the overall functionality of the family system. And, on an even grander scale, a company, a governmental agency, a school, or a hospital, also functions as a system which component parts that must all function well for the organization to be healthy.
A system has an outside boundary that defines its limits. The skin on your body defines the boundary for your physical system. Your subsystems also have boundaries. The veins define the boundaries of the circulatory system. The nerve endings define the boundaries of the nervous system.
Systems vary in the amount of information or material that can come through their boundaries. A closed system allows little outside material or information to enter into the system. An open system allows information or material to freely pass through the boundaries. The body’s respiratory system is an open system that freely allows oxygen into the body through the lungs, where it the oxygen transfers from the lungs into the circulatory system and out into the body’s cells. The body’s skin, on the other hand, acts as a relatively closed system to keep outside materials from entering the system.
It is important to remember that the subsystems in a systems covary – meaning that they impact one another, often in surprising and unpredictable ways. An increase in the work of your respiratory system can cause your skin to change color. A surprising remark can have the same effect for some people.
A Hierarchy of Systems
All systems exist as part of a hierarchy of systems. (2) You, as an individual, are a system. Your family is a larger system of which you are a part. The family has subsystems, which are the individual family members. Family therapists know that the subsystems covary, meaning that they impact each other in both predictable and surprising ways. When a child has trouble in school, it may be the result of problems in the family system, such as dysfunctional behavior of a parent, that emerges through the child’s actions. When treating behavioral problems of a family member, it is often beneficial to bring the whole family system together for discussion and therapy. The subsystem cannot be healed if other parts of the system reopen wounds or continue to create stress.
Work groups are systems, too. The group is made up of individuals who are each a subsystem and these individuals covary, meaning that they impact each other in many ways. When one member of a group displays dysfunctional behavior, such as coming to work late, it creates stress on everyone in the group and may lead to many unpredictable responses from the rest of the group.
As in families, therapy for a group system is best handled in a group setting, where interactions can be observed and discussed. Teambuilding is an approach to addressing issues within a work group as a system. Sometimes, organizations avoid working on systems issues because they do not like to openly discuss their problems. They might prefer to counsel people in private, which creates another set of unpredictable responses.
A company is a system within which there are numerous subsystems such as manufacturing, procurement, sales, finance, quality, personnel and maintenance groups. Each subsystem of the company will ideally be making decisions and functioning for the good of the whole system. Sometimes, however, a subsystem loses sight of the overall picture and begins working primarily for its own benefit. Most people in the workplace have firsthand experiences with “suboptimization” which occurs when one part of the company puts its interests and needs above the interests of the entire organization.
A city is a system and has subsystems such as public works, law enforcement, fire protection, revenue collection, and utilities, along with its own unique elected leadership. Like the business system, the city subsystems will hopefully be making decisions and functioning for the overall good. The creation of change must take into account the various subsytems and how they will be impacted and how they may respond to changes.
An educational system, whether a single school or an entire school organization or a university exists as a system and has many subsystems. Again, it is possible for these subsystems to make decisions that will optimize their own interests or they may be careful to fully understand the impact of potential changes on other subsystems and work out mutually beneficial changes. All of the subsystems in an educational system will covary, meaning they will impact one another. For example, a change in the athletics department regarding practice time for a team can disrupt the pedagogy in the science department when student-athletes suddenly do not show up for their scheduled lab time.
Unfortunately, many methods of reward in organizations encourage suboptimization of subsystems. Managers are often measured solely on the performance of their subsystem and not on how well it cooperated with other subsystems. This, of course, has many unanticipated results which create dysfunction throughout the organization. It does not take much consulting experience to reach the conclusion that many organizational systems have a considerable degree of dysfunction within their system. However, many consultants focus on how to fix one subsystem, which is obviously “broken” or in need of redesign, without considering the broader reality where unseen problems in one subsystem are creating visible problems in another subsystem. Often we think the problem is one of leadership, so we change the leader, but the new person is saddled with the same systemic problems that were creating difficulties for his or her predecessor.
Homeostasis
One of the basic rules of systems is that they strive maintain a balance. (3) This balance, called homeostasis (meaning a dynamic equilibrium) is maintained around some comfortable middle ground. This middle ground, or central tendency, could be a healthy balance of the needs of the subsystems, which leads to a health body, family, or organization. On the other hand, the central tendency could be around an unbalanced trend when one subsystem dominates the rest of the system, causing to total system to become unhealthy.
It does not matter whether the central tendency is a healthy or unhealthy one. It just is. By virtue of being what it is, it will also resist change. Forces for change will be met by resisting counterforces seeking to maintain stability. This is the basic principle of dynamic equilibrium, in which a force for change meets and internal resistance to keep change from occurring.
Hegel observed this dynamic in creating his concept of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, postulating that out of the exchange of force and counterforce would emerge a new synthesis, and in a sense, this is always true. However, the synthesis you get may not be the synthesis you want. For instance, an organization’s push to reduce costs may be countered by employees taking actions that drive away customers or offend the citizens it serves.
Linear vs. Systems Thinking
Those people who do not think in terms of systems have an rather simple belief that change will occur in a linear cause and effect manner. To create change, you do A, which leads to B, and then this leads to C. In a linear approach to improving quality, a consultant flow charts a process, identifies a cause of poor quality, and then trains people to do things differently. When the linear process fails to achieve our expectations, we blame the people involved. The trainers were incompetent or the employees were not cooperative. In linear thinking, we do not stop to consider everything that is going on in the system that might influence our ability to implement change. We do not ask what forces support the current methods and what resistance we will encounter. This realization was such a major observation that Joseph Juran offered, devoting an entire chapter in Managerial Breakthrough to understanding and overcoming resistance to change. (4)
Change in systems involves feedback. Someone does A, which starts to lead to B, but people involved with B go talk to people over in D who have a different slant on things and they bring in C, who starts to redirect A. Where did things go wrong? They didn’t. This is normal. In any organization there are many people who believe they are in control. In a sense, they are right, because they probably have some degree of formal or informal power or influence. But, in another sense, everyone is an organization is part of the system and has some degree of influence. Everyone influences other parts of the system, therefore no one is every really in control of a system. It has a life of its own due to the countless interactions that go on every day within the system.
Systems create synergy, meaning that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Synergy is the result of all the countless interactions that release energy in the organization. All organizations have synergy. Some synergy spins the organization in an upward spiral of success. Other synergy spins the organization in a downward spiral of defeat. Synergy exists in any system whether you like it or not. The challenge is to create an upward spiral of positive energy instead of allowing a downward spiral to occur.
Changing a System
As Alfred North Whitehead noted, progress is the art of deciding what parts of a system to change and what parts of a system to protect from change. A leader’s role is to help the system change from within so that it adapts to changing conditions outside of the system and creates new opportunities for progress. So, it is important to ask, how do systems change?
One must start with the understanding that systems do not want to change, although they will wear down over time. By their nature, systems seek a consistent, stable, central tendency. However, to survive, systems often need to change in order to thrive in changing conditions. The leader’s job is to introduce change into the system, where appropriate, knowing full well that the system is going to resist and react in unpredictable ways. To maintain their comfortable balance, systems create rules. There are two types of rules to struggle with in the system – the formalized policies and procedures and the unwritten rules that make up the informal behavioral expectations. They may be at odds with one another.
Written rules are created to protect the interests of a particular subsystem and are often intended to protect the sustainability of the total system. The Human Resources organization establishes rules to govern hiring, discipline, and other processes to protect the organization from law suit and provide an orderly flow of work. The rules also protect the Human Resources subsystem. The Quality Department establishes rules to protect the organization from shipping a substandard product. The same rules also reinforce the role and position of the Quality Department as a subsystem within the total system.
Stages of Change
There are many ways to describe how change occurs and the pace at which in can occur in an organization.(5) Social scientists who work from the perspective of systems theory have offered the view that there are three stages in change in a system. The first stage involves softening up the organization in preparation for change and getting it ready. This has been called unfreezing the current system. It is often called an education phase. Some call this early encounter, awareness of impending change and developing a positive perception of the coming change. The purpose is to broadcast to people in the system that change is coming and that it will be a change for the better.
The second stage of change is the implementation phase. This means making the change, installing it, doing it, cutting out the old and inserting the new. You stop talking about it and do it.
The third stage of change is to make things normal again, refreeze the system, reinforce new behaviors, institutionalize and internalize the change. It becomes the new world order. It is the way it is, so get used to it. The fight is over, let’s get on with doing our work around here. It is new growth, so learn to deal with it.
The proper pace for change depends on many factors. How major a change is this? How much cooperation do you need? How much shock can the system tolerate? How urgent is the need to change? How strong are the forces for change? Regardless of how quickly you implement change, the three steps of unfreezing, making the change, and refreezing the system continue to apply.
Force Field Analysis
Kurt Lewin created an image of change as involving a force field in which forces supporting change and forces resisting change encounter one another.(6) Systems are stable when the forces for and against change remain balanced or when the restraining forces outweigh the forces driving change. Change is created by understanding and strengthening the driving forces and/or by weakening the restraining forces.
Lewin’s concept can be applied in a multitude of settings that involve changing systems. On the individual level, behavioral change occurs when the forces supporting change have more influence than the forces that resist the change. Individuals may have a strong desire to stop smoking, but the force of addiction can be stronger than the desire to quit. To create change, the resisting force may need to be weakened, perhaps by using a nicotine patch to decrease the dependency on tobacco.
In a family setting, there may be a desire to spend more time together in conversation. The driving force may be the need to communicate and deal effectively with issues outside the family unit. The resisting force may be the desire to watch programs on television. The family’s behavior will be determined by which of these two forces is stronger. A strategy needs to be developed that will weaken the routine of watching television and strengthen the opportunities for conversation.
In a work setting, there are multiple forces at play around any issue. The change agent needs to fully understand the forces driving the need for change and the forces that will resist the change and create a strategy for strengthening the driving forces and weakening the restraining forces.
Joseph Juran observed that change in an organization always involves two areas, the technical change and the social consequences of the change. Reading an article by Margaret Mead on South Sea Island cultures, Juran saw the workplace as a culture with distinct norms and values. Change threatens to upset the norms, so change is often resisted.(7)
Systems resist change, according to Juran’s model, by resisting the technical change, while the real resistance may be the unspoken fear of the social consequences of the change. Juran noted that railway workers resisted the diesel locomotive, stating that it was unsafe to have an engineer alone in the engine. They really feared the loss of the jobs of the firemen (a social consequence).
Juran’s observation is an important part of understanding the unpredictable nature in which change occurs within a system. People resist a change, but often offer a reason for their resistance that is different from their real reason. How do you cope with this in a linear model of change? You cannot.
This is where Lewin’s idea of weakening the resisting forces is best applied. When the change agent is in the first phase of change (unfreezing, education, and developing a positive perception about the potential change) this is the time to identify what social consequences will be forthcoming and find ways to minimize negative results that will create resistance.
Juran suggested that change occurs when innovators are able to show the mass of people in a system how a change will benefit them. Few people, according to Juran, volunteer for change, but they will gladly change when they start to see others benefiting from the change.
However, Juran also suggested that a small number of inhibitors will resist change because it threatens their status or influence in the system. The resistance will come in the form of plausible reasons why the new idea will not work. Rarely does the resister admit the deeper social reasons for resisting the change.
*Materials are drawn from Empowerment and Democracy in the Workplace, Quorom Books, 1997 by Dr. John Robert Dew.
(1) W. Bennis, K. Benne, and R. Chin. The Planning of Change. Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1958.
(2) Barbara Okun. Working With Adults. Brooks,Cole Publishing, 1984.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Joseph Juran. Managerial Breakthrough. McGraw-Hill, 1964.
(5) Kurt Lewin. Resolving Social Conflicts. Harper & Row, 1948.
(6) Kurt Lewin. Field Theory in Social Science. Harper & Row, 1951.
(7) Juran.