Do you feel overwhelmed with the amount of change in your organization? Yet, as a leader, you feel you have no choice but to change constantly.
Creating an organization that can use change to drive growth and performance, with healthy, engaged employees, is a game-changer. But it can’t be done by bombarding your employees with one change initiative after another.
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The barrage of change initiatives imposed by many organizations on their employees can reduce organizational capacity. The result is that you get less real change and reinforce the status quo.
But an organization that can adapt without major disruptions to its operation can use change for growth. Achieving that goal requires systems thinking.
What is Systems Thinking?
Systems thinking is a way to explore and understand the interrelationships among the various parts of your organization. Systems thinking is holistic thinking.
It is an essential element for sustainable organizational change.
Why Does Systems Thinking Make a Difference?
There is a classic children’s song called “Dem Bones,” which goes something like the “Toe bone is connected to the heel bone. The foot bone is connected to the leg bone… You get the idea.
Your organization is similar. It is more than just a collection of isolated parts. It’s an integrated multi-dimensional system. As a system, your organization has a character and rhythm that is separate, distinct, and much greater than any one part.
Only when you understand each change within the context of the whole organization can you achieve sustainable change.
Systems thinking allows you to look beyond the individual parts and see the interactions and interdependencies of all the changes in your organization.
Learning to use systems thinking has many benefits for your organizational change efforts.
Two Benefits of Systems Thinking for Sustainable Change
1. You prevent solving a problem in one area only to create problems in other areas. Applying systems thinking when enabling change allows you to see and address hidden interconnections within your organization.
Every organizational change, regardless of its size, will send a ripple through your organization. The extent to which any ripple or wave will affect your organization depends on the complexity and magnitude of the change.
When an organizational change is approached and led as a single event or project, you are more likely to overlook all but the most immediate or largest waves.
For example, one organization made a series of small changes in one department to improve efficiency. These changes cascaded to several other departments that were unprepared. The result was a loss of overall efficiency for the organization.
2. You can take advantage of collateral change
Collateral change is the ability to achieve other strategic or desired new behaviours without consciously adding new change initiatives or projects.
The ability to recognize and leverage collateral change in your organization will help you achieve multiple outcomes with fewer change initiatives. You reduce the risk of change fatigue and employee burnout.
Integrating systems thinking into your change leadership is a skill, and, like any skill, it must be practiced to gain its benefits.
Start with one question when launching your next change initiative.
How does this new change initiative interact and relate with change initiatives and our current operational environment?
