Weeks 5 & 6 — The Systems Perspective

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks wrestling with machine metaphors for organizations, and now we’re turning to a different metaphor: systems. The biggest difference between the systems perspective and the approaches we’ve studied is that the systems perspective emphasizes the relationships and/or connections between parts and people. In systems theory, where we borrow metaphors from life sciences, communication is a process that creates relationships and is thus central to the effectiveness of an organization. These differences from earlier perspectives are the first takeaway for chapter 4 (see Table 4.2 on p. 116 for a good overview comparing both approaches). The other is the process of sense making.

The main points of the systems perspective can be explained by comparing them to parts of the human body:

1. The parts of a system are interdependent; therefore, an efficiently functioning system cannot maximize its independent parts. For example, the human heart cannot just decide it is going to pump up to 400 rpm.
2. Organisms are open systems and must interact with their environments. We must breathe, eat, and excrete, or we will die. Like bodies, organizations must also be open and interact with their environments (inputs and outputs, such as people and supplies), or they will die.
3. According to systems theory, there is no “one best way” to organize. Organizations are contingent on changing environments. Likewise, different bodies adapt to different climates and cultures.

(from the textbook’s Instructors Manual)

Karl Weick’s sense-making model revived systems thinking. According to the model, organizing has three parts

1. enactment — processes through which environments are made through actions
2. selection — collective sense-making that is accomplished through communication
3. retention — remembering developed interpretations for later use

An important assumption underlies Weick’s theory: people act first and later examine their actions and attempt to explain their meaning. This retrospective approach makes sense-making very different from approaches we studied such as strategic control where specific goals come first, then actions. The sense-making “recipe” is “How will I know what I think until I see what I say?” (1979)

Weick argues that sense-making has seven important properties (1995 — you can change the “I” to “we” for whole organizations):

1. identity construction — how and what I think indicates who I am
2. retrospection — looking back over what I said helps me know what I think
3. enactment — I create objects when I say and do things
4. socialization — who socialized me and how determine what I say, notice, and conclude
5. continuation — my communication competes for attention over time
6. extracted cues — I single out only some portions of communication, in part because of my own disposition and context
7. plausibility — I need to know only enough to do my work, so sufficiency and plausibility are more important than accuracy.

Watching Oceans Eleven

This movie provides an excellent depiction of interdependence and illustrates the concepts central to sense making: enactment, selection, and retention. How does the team make sense of their heist?

Ideas for Your Blog Posts

• Explain how Oceans Eleven illustrates enactment, selection, and retention or the seven properties of sense-making.
• Draw a system diagram for an organization you know well (e.g., Illinois Tech, your family, your workplace). Explain how the parts of the organization are integrated and what they enable. What do you notice about what’s similar or different between your drawing and one someone else did?
• Read the What Would You Do? box titled “Locavores, Sustainability, and Systems” (p. 103). What impacts do the terms locavore and carbon footprint have on the way we organize our eating practices? Can you tell where the foods you eat were produced? Which interdependent organizations were involved in bringing your food to your table? How could you reorganize the ways you eat based on what you’ve read?
• I didn’t mention the learning organization in my notes, but it’s a important theory posed by Peter Senge. Explain the 5 features of learning organizations. Are any of the organizations of which you are a member learning organizations? How do you know?