I got quite interesting responses to my question about what Deming might
have meant when he said that a system cannot understand itself.
One of my favorite responses pointed out that water has a fairly stable
response to temperature changes until about 32 F degrees (my apologies to
those of you in the rest of the world where water freezes at 0 C). "You
can know all about water but not understand ice."
We are perhaps undergoing a similar change in terms of our organizations?
So much of the old management methods (the old system) do not apply to the
transformation to new systems. That is, a system cannot understand
itself.
As is the intention in these forums, I learned by simply sharing what
puzzled me. Thanks to all who shared comments on A System Cannot
Understand Itself.
-- Ron Davison (RonDavison@aol.com), video producer of "A Change in Thinking: Systems Thinking, Learning, & Intellectual Capital"Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>