In response to Barry Mallis's considered comments about systems and their
people.
>Bill provoked some reflection with his observations and questions back to Mike
>about the system being "...'us', that is the people who are in the community
>in question...". Bill suggests that we may be looking for system problems as
>a "convenient, non-threatening answer" to problems which in the first cause
>reside inside the individual.
>
>I will understand him to mean that the problem comes from misplaced (or worse,
>bad) intention acting on a system. The intention is all the individual's.
I am wary of collapsing the use of 'us' to an individual intention. If my
original post implied individual intention let me eat my words. My intention
is to consider the system as including all of the people involved, the whole
community of practice.
As I observe dysfunctional systems one conclusion I reach is that the
dysfunction persists because the community allows the dysfunction. I assert
that there is a critical mass of the community that must come together with
the intent to correct the dysfunction.
If this is a valid assertion then the change agent must seek to form that
critical mass. This critical mass probably consists of several communities.
There is a small community with the intent to eliminate the dysfunctional
behavior and replace it with different behavior (which they consider not
dysfunctional). There is a larger community that does not wish the current
dysfunctional behavior to continue. These welcome the change but are reluctant
about participating in it. The change agent influences both of there communities.
>Do we sometimes mix the individual and the group in our thinking on this list,
>so that we describe oil and water situations?
I think not. My reading of the list makes me think that we are good at keeping
individual and community behavior properly separated. I see another aspect,
that is the list discussion attempts to talk of the system as separate from the
community of people that participate in the system. And then -- blame the
inanimate un intentioned system for its dysfunction. Duh!
--bhobler@worldnet.att.net Bill Hobler
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>