Ask about an organization and you may be handed an organizational chart with boxes in neat little columns and rows. While most people know, intuitively, that a page of boxes does not conform to workplace reality, few are aware of the degree to which such notions damage managerial effectiveness. Hierarchies of boxes promote silo thinking and that is the opposite of systems thinking. Departments can, and often do, become silos (those tall, thin windowless structures that are great for storage of grain). Organizational silos in healthcare promote terrible patterns of organizational behavior and declines in the quality of care. Windowless walls tend to retard essential communication and inhibit cooperation. Each silo, or department, tends to optimize itself, often at the expense of the organization as a whole. Leaders in such organizations spend much of their time passing information from silo to silo and resolving the conflicts that must arise from silo thinking. Too little time is spent ensuring that work processes are being done in a way that impact patients positively. Such organizations tend to place customer satisfaction way down on the priority list, because they are too busy with fights between silo managers and playing games that are a product of poor communication and limited cooperation.
While discussions of systems often drift into lofty abstractions, it is actually a very practical concept. Peter Sholtes, a disciple of quality guru W. Edwards Deming, says these are characteristics of a system:
1. A system is a whole composed of many parts. He suggests a car as a concrete example of a system.
2. Each unit, or part, of the system has a different purpose in relation to the overall purpose of that car providing transportation.
3. Each unit or part contributes to the overall purpose, but no part can do so by itself. You can’t drive the brakes to the airport, but just try driving to the airport without brakes.
4. The parts are dependent on one another, or interdependent, in fulfilling the goal of transportation. You will not get where you need to go without an accelerator pedal. but it must be connected to the fuel injection system
5. To understand a unit, or part, you must understand how it is dependent on other parts and how it fits into the whole system (e.g. to provide transportation).
6. To understand why the system works you must look to the larger systems of which it is a part. Having a steering wheel on the right will work in some countries but not others.
7. To understand the system you must understand the purpose, its interactions and its interdependencies. Spreading the parts out on the floor tells you very little.
Any organization is a system with social and technical components. There are interdependent parts (e.g. departments, divisions, teams, individuals) each of which has interests and purposes which should, but do not always, contribute to the primary goals of the organization. The new leader must look at the system as a whole, understand the importance of interdependencies and ensure all parts contribute to the whole.
