There’s a lot of noise and chaos out there. In their lives an in their organizations, people are feeling lost and powerless. What can we do? How can we have positive leadership and take action for change?
Systemic Thinking for Systemic Action
If things are not going right in your life and organization you can do something about it. Sometimes people say, “We’d like to change but we’re just so busy – the situation isn’t right yet.” That’s EXACTLY when you have to act because, guess what, things don’t get better by themselves, they get worse.
What can be done? A huge part of our work at Intelligent Management has to do with taking the raw material of people’s current reality and transforming that into an actionable sequence of tasks that address what to change, what to change to and how to make the change happen (in fact we dedicate an entire chapter of our last book to change – see ‘Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization‘.
So we start with the intangibles, with the ‘bitching and moaning’ because that comes easily. These are called ‘Undesirable Effects’ in the Theory of Constraints. From there we derive, organically and systematically, a realistic action plan to make the right changes towards a desired future reality that overcomes what is unsatisfactory about the current reality. Rolling out the action plan requires working through the various levels of resistance to change and we work with a precise and structured way for that. We do this at the level of organizations and businesses. What we do engenders in people the ability to think systemically and creatively, in other words, see implications, negative and positive to pre-empt situations and direct them in the desired way.
It requires some courage and imagination, the ability to imagine a better future instead of just putting up with the present. Courage, because instead of just passively taking what is happening, we decide to consciously design our own reality, as far as that is humanly possible. And then adhere to a realistic action plan for positive change. In other words, we take on the responsibility of being co-creators for positive change. (See Thinking Processes).
And something almost magical happens. We learn to connect the dots, to see possibilities that were otherwise unimaginable, and just by making this effort alone, we make a positive difference for ourselves and those around us.
It’s about doing things
It’s tempting to feel that things are unfair, to withdraw into our own bubble and exchange self-reinforcing opinions on Facebook. Or withdraw into our own thoughts. While there is always space for enlightened contemplation, if you do not then transform that into coherent actions and work, you are just adding more chaos.
Times have changed. Reality is dominated by complexity and new interdependencies that we ignore at our peril. We’re all in this together and we can exert positive leadership, building healthy goals and interdependencies and an action plan for positive change through systemic thinking and methods.
And if you know a company or a school or a university that could benefit form learning more about systemic thinking for a positive present and future, please let us know. There is no time to lose and we are here to help. Contact us here.
Since 1999, we have been presenting a new model for a systemic organization in detail, both in terms of the thinking behind it and how to conduct operations. We work alongside CEOs and Executive Teams to support the shift towards more effective, systemic strategy and operations. Our books include ‘Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue‘, ‘Sechel: Logic, Language and Tools to Manage Any Organization’, ‘The Human Constraint‘ and most recently, ‘Quality, Involvement and Flow: The Systemic Organization’ . We support our international clients through education, training and the Ess3ntial multi-project software using Critical Chain to schedule competencies and unlock the potential of human resources. Based on our proprietary Decalogue methodology.
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