DC91: Chapter 7: Building a Product Organisation through systems thinking and being

Apr 27

6 min read

This article was first published here: https://deeperchange.substack.com/p/dc91-chapter-7-experience-the-system

It occurs to me, that the work on state, sometimes called state of consciousness, and drawing down energetic shapes from the fifth dimension, can be thought of something mystical or esoteric. It isn’t that way for me, but I recognise that the conversation isn’t typical in discussions of organisational change or product capability. Most would consider this pretty far out!

I will therefore take a moment to draw your attention to Systems Thinking and Coaching, which I have been using and teaching for years and is fairly well accepted in the current corporate culture.

Many organisations and their leaders, however, also struggle with concepts of Systems Thinking, and if you are in this camp, I urge you to take the time to learn it, as it is not really possible to make much meaningful change without a solid knowledge and experience of Systems. I will cover some basics here from the perspective of explaining building a real Product Capability Foundation.

Basic Systems Thinking

A System is composed of many ‘things’ that are tangible and obvious, such as individual people, teams, and departments. The customers we have and the products we sell them are tangible and observable.

We can write each of these things on a sticky note and place it on the wall, virtually or otherwise. However, it is pretty obvious that without connecting lines between the items, the system model we are creating is pretty meaningless.

As we start to draw the lines between the stickies representing our tangible objects, such as these people belong to this team, or these products are sold to these customers, we can see that these lines represent relationships.

It is relationships that join systems together and move our model from a collection of things into a living system. These are less visible and tangible.

A system is both parts and relationships. If the org chart was redrawn with connections of trust, where would you sit?

Active systems

The systems we are interested in involve people. We humans, when working together to make things happen, form structures called organisations. Organisations have boundaries.

An organisation must adapt to survive, and this takes up energy to stay current, responsive, and adaptive. A system is said to be Active if it can correct itself. If a system is not successfully active, or in other words, adaptive, it will die.

The organisational boundary is permeable

The idea that an org end with the payroll is incorrect.

For an organisation to be active, i.e. survive, it must interact with its environment.

Typical touch points are:

Market information

We must react to information about the market, customers, buying habits, and the latest innovations that people want, which shape the products and services we offer.

Ways of working

Similarly, we must respond to changes in working patterns and people’s expectations of what work should be, which will shape how we organise ourselves internally.

Optimisation for Product Capability

When we look at influencing forces, we see that many of them come from outside of the organisation.

If we continue to draw our model with stickies on the wall, we will see that we need to add stickies representing these external factors.

It quickly becomes apparent that the organisational boundary is actually quite arbitrary.

Boundaries, therefore, are not ‘real’, they are constructs relevant to a particular context and problem space.

Ignoring this significantly reduces your ability to have a thriving Product-led and customer-focused organisation.

Parallel learning

This is true not only for organisations, but for you.

The breath you breathe, the food you eat, and the feelings you have.

Also the idea that you end with your skin is also incorrect.

Where does the boundary for a single person start and end? We might say at the limits of the physical body, but if we put that body in the vacuum of space, it would quickly die. Therefore, the body requires a certain environment to survive.

Your internal stability is affected by elements in the wider environment through physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual factors.

Even the physical boundary of the body is contextual, as cells replace themselves so frequently that by the age of 7, there is not a single cell in your body that is the same as when you were born. We are not even the same person; only an underlying pattern keeps coherence. Similarly, people inside an organisation leave and join. I wonder how often an organisation/department/team becomes a totally different entity without us realising it.

Systems Thinking

So far, and in the discipline in general, we have been doing a lot of thinking. We are thinking about systems, not experiencing them somatically. This is the next stage of systems awareness.

When I was in my late teens, I found myself shaving in the bathroom. I paid a huge amount of time and energy watching myself shave. To my great surprise, I cut myself.

I went into my brother’s room and said to him, “How can it be possible that even though I have been focusing intently on shaving, I still cut myself?”

He said to me, “That is because you were watching yourself shaving, and not shaving”.

This has stuck with me all my life, and I realised there is a huge difference between thinking about a thing, doing a thing, and being in flow with a thing. This is extremely relevant to organisational change.

In this next section, I will teach you how to be the organisational change you wish to bring about rather than just think about it. This is hugely important if you don’t want to cut yourself!

Systems Thinking to Systems Awareness to Systems Being

Our focus, taught to us by our culture, is that we focus our awareness in a single body. We have come to identify ourselves as a single person.

This is learnt. Up until about age 5, we think we are the same person as our mother.

Separation is learnt.

The awareness that we have makes us feel or believe that we are separate from our environments. However, as seen above, this is not entirely true. We are constantly interacting and being replaced by the environment. Our personal boundaries are permeable.

This is easy to demonstrate. When you get dressed in the morning and leave the house, you do not embody yourself as naked with clothes on. The clothes you wear become part of you, temporarily, whilst you are wearing them.

We can say we identify with the clothes we wear and forget completely about them as we navigate our way through the day.

Let’s extend this exercise even more. When you drive your car, the same things happen. You extend your awareness to the edge and slightly beyond as you drive. You ‘know‘ where the edge of your car is, not by working it out continuously but by extending your awareness.

Now, imagine you can do that for the whole organisational system that you are working with. This is what I’m talking about when I say we ‘be‘ the system and not just think about it.

Who exactly are you? And how far can you extend your awareness?

Thousands of years of research

You can quite easily follow awareness practice exercises that have been written down and repeated for thousands of years. Traditions such as Yoga and Meditation have been created for exactly this purpose.

We can shift our awareness to any part of the wider system, or all of it, if desired. Everything is woven together by those connecting lines, forming an intricate, broader pattern of awareness inherent in all things.

The shift from merely thinking about systems (Systems Thinking) to experiencing the awareness and consciousness of that system (Systems Being) is a completely different skill. But it is a skill nonetheless, and one that is eventually required on this path of organisational change and in creating better societies and a better world to live in.