It’s The System, Stupid
Those of you living outside the UK may not be aware of the uproar in the country caused by our elected Members of Parliament abusing expense allowances, seemingly regarding them as an entitlement and a way to supplement their salaries. The common defence, to a man and woman, is “I have done nothing wrong. It is the system. That is wrong. The system let me do it. I stayed within the rules and my expense claim was authorised”.
Systems and Organisational Development
I have been thinking about the influence of systems recently. As part of a PR push, I am writing a lot of articles. One editor told me that her publication’s readers are asking about articles on Organisational Development (OD). The term is a bit out of fashion. In all the Two Point Zero this and that, you do not hear many people talk about OD and if you do, it is from old hands like myself who have been around the block a few times.
More is the pity. I say this is because OD has an overt focus on the link between systems design and effectiveness of performance. From the CIPD Factsheet on Organisational Development:
“Organisational development applies to changes in strategy, structure and processes of an entire system … focused on effectiveness through workforce skills, knowledge and engagement in problem-solving, innovation and knowledge-sharing.”
Creating Learning Architectures
People are using other terminology, like Learning Architectures to describe systems for orchestrating learning within and between innovation eco-systems of enterprises. Although John Seely Brown talks about how Toyota works with its suppliers as though it is a new phenomenon, it is not. We already have a wealth of knowledge of systemic strategies, structures and processes through at least 15 – 20 years EU-funded research on collective learning and innovation across distributed manufacturing supply chains. (Thanks to www.bpodr.co.uk for the link to Seely-Brown’s engaging talk).
I really like the terms Learning Architecture and Social Architecture, both of which reflect current workplace developments (enterprise fragmentation and connectedness). My plea, as ever, would be to recognise that we have a lot to learn fom OD insights, which we risk losing as the term fall into disuse.
How systems are designed and put in place influences how people behave and perform. I have written more on the subject here.
Geary Rummler, an expert practitioner of human performance technology (related in many ways to OD) once said that if you put a good person in a bad system, the system wins every time.
Also, Jon Husband’s work on developing the wirearchy framework (http://wirearchy.com) is an attempt to address some of the issues you raise. Jon comes from an OD background
Thank you for taking the time to comment, Harold.
Yes, Jon and I have a had a few blog exchanges, and it was he who kindly recommended your blog to me.
aaargh… and I used the term ‘OD’ at least three times in various contexts today! I feel ancient!
But thanks for cutting through the jargon for me – it’s kind of reassuring to know that we are still re-inventing the same wheel.
Btw – excellent article….
Steve
From one old fogey to another
I am very glad to hear about your recent uses of OD and would be delighted to be wrong about its falling into disuse.
My comments on OD were based on my RSS feeds and conversations I follow. But there must still be significant awareness, judging by the fact that the editor I spoke about in my post said that her readers were asking for articles on OD. So I may have been talking rubbish!
I agree about OD, Anne-Marie, but the fact remains that all MPs were are are aware that the first principle of claiming expenses and allowances is that they should be reasonable and open to scrutiny as such by outsiders. This is a principle of best practice with which anyone who has worked in any organisation is familiar. Best, John
I like the term “social architecture”, too .. in fact, so much so that it’s in my email signature (and has been for several years now