Senge’s Arch-e-types

No pun intended. Peter Senge’s ideas of the learning organization and systems thinking which revolutionized the discipline as well as the practitioners of management, created a space in every scientific mind with the aches of his archetypes. His book, The Fifth Discipline, describes these archetypes, through arches in Influence diagrams, in so lucid a manner that the ‘-e-‘ connection with that of literary works in Islam is noticeable.

Senge’s systems archetypes show us phenomena that exist very commonly in our systems but we miss them with equal ease. In this blog, I will discuss four of the most common nine archetypes that he has introduced. The focus as we go through his archetypes should be on what we, the tribe of managers, can take home.

1.    1. Balancing Process With Delay

Often the systems we deal with responds to our actions but with a delay. The issue arises when we are not aware of the delay. Of course we may take corrective action after the system has responded fully but our corrective actions will again take time to show effects with a delay. But, how do we know our system-in-focus belongs to this archetype? An easy way is we think we are on the right track and with gradual change we find that our track has changed. An example of such a system is shown in the figure below, where the heater adjusts the water temperature with a delay, say of 15 seconds. But as we do not receive any hot water for 15 seconds, we do not turn the heater off any sooner. And after 15 seconds, the temperature of water is much higher than what we can take. We would not have committed the error of keeping the heater on for 15 seconds if we knew of the delay in its response.

Image Source : www.juergendaum.com/news/10_06_2001.htm

We often encounter this archetype in macroeconomics, which is why RBI waits for at least four months to evaluate the effectiveness of a monetary policy. Fiscal policies have even a longer time lag.

The take away for managers, in the words of Peter Senge is, “Either be patient or make the system more responsive”

 2. Shifting the Burden

This explains the behavior of organizations that are too preoccupied with achieving targets and solving the problem fast so that they end up using the symptomatic quick fix way. However, as the system starts stabilizing through the use of the symptomatic solution, its effectiveness reduces but due to easy results, the people stop taking the more fundamental but longer path. A very relevant such system is presented in www.threesigma.com/systems_primer.htm :

Image Source : www.threesigma.com/systems_primer.htm

“The result is an over reliance on the quick solution and diminished capacity for the long-term solution.”

The lesson for managers, by Senge, is to use symptomatic solution if it is imperative as delays occur in the fundamental solution to start working. However, he says that the use of the former should be strictly used to buy time while we are at work on the fundamental one.

 

3. Success to the Successful

Image Source : http://agencyspy.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the-boys-club-says-bye-bye-to-boost/

In this archetype, a common resource is being shared by two, while the control is with a third party who wants the highest utility out of the resource. More the success of one of the two, more is the allocation of the resource to her; while the second one loses right to it. As the allocation of resource reduces for the less successful, her performance also falls thereby making the former even more successful.

This happens with organizations that follow ICAM for allocation of funds – the more successful an SBU is, more is the funds doled out to it and even more successful it becomes due to fund sufficiency.

Senge’s advice to managers in this case is to achieve a balanced output from both the choices - “break or weaken the coupling the two entities competing for the limited resource so that unhealthy competition for resources is not encouraged”.

 

4. Growth and Under-investment

Corporations are victims to the Sigmoid curve. In order to lift the limit on growth, an organization should undertake the path of capacity expansion. However, the very nature of the investment required pushes back the incentive to invest – “the investment must be aggressive and sufficiently rapid to forestall reduced growth”, in the words of Senge. Thus, organizations find ways to under-invest – they lower the performance metrics. 

The take home for managers in these situations according to Senge is, “if there is a genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand”. The vision for the growth should be held onto through development of challenging performance standards.  

Having read through the systems archetypes, the simplicity with which Senge has captured the important systems characteristics through influence diagrams amazes me. No wonder his book, The Fifth Discipline has found so wide a reach. However, planning in organizations has moved ahead of the imperative study of systems. We talk of creating the system today; however, doing so will not be possible until we have sufficient knowledge of how systems behave. His archetypes build a strong foundation in every corporate planner.

 

Reference

Senge, Peter M.(1990). The Fifth Discipline : The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. USA: Doubleday Currency

Untangling the Mess?

Genesis of Mess Management – Study of the System-in-focus

Source : leeswamy.wordpress.com

We all have a very archetypal way of approaching what we also call the core competency of us MBAs – problem solving. Breaking it down into the three major components, problem solving is –

1.      1.  Understand the system

2.       2. Define the problem

3.       3. Solve the problem

The obsession of the business community however hovers around the latter two. ‘After all, what is so very complicated about the system? We are a part of it and had been so. Cracking the system is easier’ is the mentality that resonates in board rooms. But, for them problem definition and approach are of utmost importance. This attitude is the reason for our limited knowledge of the system and higher knowledge of its heightened problems. We never look beyond the scope of our problems. In fact, even though definition and solution of the problem follows understanding the system, we see the system only with a perspective of identifying the problems. Our study of the system is like that of a policeman frisking a man with a purpose of finding a stolen wallet hidden somewhere in his clothes. If we ask the policeman what was the color or pattern of clothes the latter was wearing, he will not even remember as he had never looked at them. All the while during the frisk, he had been looking at the invisible wallet. 

Due to such thinking, we lose the benefits that arise out of studying the system in the long term. After one problem is solved, we are soon back at the discussion table with the same system but with a different set of problems capturing our mind. This happens because we had never studied the system at the first place, we had studied only our focused problems. 

The flawed approach in the above is not hidden from the thinking minds of our world. The development of Mess Management as a tool certainly had this issue in mind.

The Systems view discussed above is where Mess Management takes over. What faces corporations is not one problem but an interconnected set of problems – The Mess. The idea is not to study one or a few problems that are troubling us but to get to all the factors that form a part of the system. The mess is represented through the help of an Influence Diagram.

However the beauty of Mess Management is not really in untangling the mess – it is in dissolving the mess. Let us delve a little deeper into what I understand about this concept. Many of us would have experienced a ‘bully of the class’ during childhood. I remember my nursery school days – she would snatch my tiffin box and if I resisted, I had had the better of her. The idea of complaining to the teachers never came because she was the one forming teams on the playground. If I had complained, she would never allow me to play games. Then one day, my elder brother gave me an idea. I put a stale spinach leaf in my sandwich. And wow! It worked magic. She never touched my tiffin box again. This example is actually ‘dissolving the mess’. Notwithstanding my mess of problem with the bully, my brother introduced another problem – the stale leaf to dissolve the mess. He has a view that the action would reorganize the mess in a manner so as to ameliorate my life.

When I studied the concept of mess management in the course Corporate Planning, I knew I had been introduced to it very young in my life, thanks to my brother. Today when I look deeply into that incident, I can understand what my actions had done to the mess that my school life was in. It had introduced a negative stabilizing loop to bring the aggravating state of affairs to its much needed halt.

I wonder if my brother had any idea of what he was doing. Only if he knew the depth of his prodigious idea, that it laid in the mind of a systems thinker too.

Dissolving Versus Resolving or Solving

For all those who found the above story of dissolving the mess interesting, it would be a good idea to culminate the learning the difference of ‘dissolving’ from what we human being often do – ‘solving’ and ‘resolving’. As we found in the above post, dissolving is rearranging the system, adding new elements of complexity so as to stabilize the system. Solving, on the other hand, is when we strictly follow a methodical approach to defining and solving a problem, not taking cognizance of a systems perspective of problem – a mess. Whereas, resolving is trying to cope with the system through a superficial treatment. Like when we take pain killers for headache, we just work at the symptom – the headache and not the root that is causing the headache, maybe sleepless nights.