Pacific Innovation & Leadership

Does Your Business Lack Systems Thinking?

By Richard M. Jones, Work Systems Canada Principal

Have you ever noticed the simple changes you tried to implement just don’t seem to work, and sometimes you are surprised at how it really shakes out? Why does A + B no longer = C anyway? Furthermore, as our business grows, the old simplicity gets more and more complicated. So, how do we respond to the complexity that running a modern business involves?

Systems Thinking is designed to enhance your ability to understand, model and resolve complex business issues. It helps us to develop the “mental elasticity” needed to anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of you or your organisation’s decisions and understand how those decisions will lead to tomorrow’s business successes or failures. The concept, based on the work of Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, and others helps us to:

• Understand the complexities of your organization from a systems’ perspective and design solutions that leverage your strengths
• Anticipate the intended and unintended consequences of today’s decisions
• View your organization as an interrelated and interdependent system rather than a collection of separate entities (i.e. departments, product groups, business units)

Understanding the power of the tools and concepts of Systems Thinking allows you to understand, model and test business assumptions and decisions. This ability can have a tremendous impact on the contribution you can make to your organization. Thinking systemically will give you the knowledge and tools to:

1. Improve your “hit-ratio” of good decisions
2. Become a more valued member of your team by increasing your ability to understand and manage increasingly complex organizations
3. Model and predict the impact that decisions will have throughout the organization before they are implemented
4. Avoid short-term thinking that can create long-term problems
5. Increase your contribution to shaping the strategic direction of your organization

An example of Unintended Consequences

“Patients won’t be so well cared for” – The Discharge Lounge Syndrome

The Discharge Lounge is an interesting example of the phenomenon of unintended consequences.

First some background. One of our clients was the CEO of a large US tertiary care hospital. One of his many challenges was to free up beds for incoming patients. Hospitals beds get paid for by both insurance companies and Medicare on a midnight bed census. If the bed is occupied it is paid for; if empty the revenue is lost. As the costs of running the beds is roughly the same with, or without, a patient in them this is a good source of revenue that was being lost because people were leaving late. To get a new patient in the bed had to be free by about 2 pm often people were discharged too late in the day for a new patient to be admitted. A review of the bed usage revealed a significant amount of income was being lost because of “empty” beds when the midnight census was taken by the payers.

When we looked at why people were leaving late we discovered:

1. This was often because they were elderly and needed collection by their children who were at work till late afternoon.
2. Nursing staff were reluctant to call their carers before the Doctor had finally signed of on their discharge as it might get their hopes up falsely
3. Nursing staff did not see it as a part of their job.
4. The nurses didn’t like to be pushy with the patient’s relations to collect them early because they had a sense that patient care would be compromised.
5. Doctors often did rounds first thing in the morning and signed off on patients well before noon.

As a solution the CEO had a Discharge Lounge set up. The lounge was comfortable and created a space for the patients to await pick up. It was staffed by a nurse from 8 am till 7 pm. The patient was still under the hospital care throughout the wait. It was equipped with magazines, newspapers and TV sets.

Though instigated to provide a space for people to await collection on the day of departure it was receiving only a small amount of use. The statistics didn’t add up. About .6 of a patient was using the lounge daily. Yet the statistics showed that patients were departing earlier and the revenues from the beds “freed up” was better than initially forecast. So what was happening?

We were asked to look into this for the CEO. What we learned, unofficially, is that the Nursing staff was extremely reluctant to send people to the discharge lounge. In their view the care would be inferior to that of the Primary Care Unit. As a result they made every effort to get the patient collected earlier. This often involved calling the patient’s primary carer, often an offspring or a sibling, and asking them to pick people up as early as possible. This being the lesser of two evils in their opinion; being pushy was better than compromising their “sense” of care.

In other words, the existence of the Lounge was having the desired effect on staff behaviour but not through the use of the Lounge.

This was a positive consequence. Though the existence of the lounge was actually the spur needed to get the nursing staff to change their behaviour and contact the next of kin earlier so they could pick up their relatives. There is a sad end to this story - over time the lounge costs could not be justified for the small number of users. Not surprisingly, the Lounge was closed after 10 months (over 220 people used it) and the problem of beds not being filled at the midnight started to creep back ………

Need more detail? Read our best practices white paper on helping organizations develop themselves to achieve sustainable breakthrough results:

Breaking the Complexity Barrier

EMAIL Work Systems Canada’s editor andrew@worksystemscanada.com and ask for your copy.

From time to time we all come up with a seemingly great idea or innovation. We are excited and we want everyone to share our joy…  at least at first.  Then reality hits.  Our peers are disinterested and seem to be placating us; those above us give us “the look”, and those we talk to below us, they are hoping it doesn’t take too long because they want to get on with their stuff.  We have all been through it.

Surprise Resistance

If we press on with our idea, and move forward on our best behavior, we can be quite surprised that those we seek to impress, come back at us with feelings that often seem to be somewhat of an attack.

In big organizations and small, the reality about putting forth innovation is that we are dealing with human beings who have anxieties, contrary opinions, and a constant fear: of what any interaction on something new might do to their standing in the group and in the company.  Add to that that most workers carry a basic skepticism about any new ideas.  This seems to be universally true regardless of our stature in our company.

Human Dynamics

To bring about change or institute innovation, we have to deal with human dynamics, dynamics that are anything but easy.   The simple goal is to take our special innovation and communicate it, get enough people to understand it, support it and then go on and make it happen. This means

1. helping people to communicate,
2. bringing them around to support your vision, your strategy, your plan, your idea
3. gaining buy in – - progressively with more and more recruits at every level and key area, and then
4. implementing it.  Gaining support is the tough part because of the human dynamic.Counterintuitive to Getting Shot Down

John P. Kotter, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School along with co-author Lorne Whitehead in their new book, Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down, have much to contribute in this matter motivation and human change.

They suggest taking a counterintuitive approach to being an advocate.  They suggest starting with a high level of respect and a noble but simple communication of the idea.  Expect resistance and then, at that point, “invite the lions in” to critique the idea.  This is counterintuitive to our natural instinct to marginalize people who oppose us in the least. Rather, it is far better to embrace the naysayers…  and to proceed without judging their reaction and motivations.  Knowing their motivation really does not help the process.

Let the Lions In

By letting the lions in, we inevitably create some fire, some conflict, some drama that draws people’s attention.  We want that attention, it’s hard to get. It’s like a little explosion that they set off for us.  Suddenly people are riveted on us as we are exposed to being attacked.  Here is where the respect part comes in:  everyone is expecting us to counterattack with data and logic, with our positional authority in the company, and with our corporate IQ.

There are four ways people try to kill ideas and innovation: fear- mongering, delay, confusion, and ridicule. Kotter & Whitehead say we will hear things like:

• Fear- Mongering
• Sounds like [something horrible] to me!
• What’s the hidden agenda here?
• You’re implying that we’ve been failing!
• Your proposal goes too far/doesn’t go far enough.
• Aha! What about THIS? [“this” being a worrisome thing that the proposers know nothing about and the attackers keep secret until just the right moment]
• Tried that before—didn’t work.
• It puts us on a slippery slope.
• We can’t afford this.

• Delay
• People have too many concerns.
• Good idea, but the timing is wrong.
• It’s just too much work to do this.
• You’ll never convince enough people.

• Confusion
• Money [or some other problem a proposal does not address] is the only real issue.
• What about this, and that, and this, and that…?
• You have a chicken and egg problem.
• You can’t have it both ways.
• It’s too difficult to understand.
• It won’t work here. We’re different.
• We’re simply not equipped to do this.

• Ridicule
• We’ve been successful. Why change?
• You exaggerate the problem.
• You’re abandoning our core values.
• It’s too simplistic to work.
• No one else does this.

Now What to Do?

What we do now, at the point of attack is critical. The most effective people, instead of just spraying retaliatory verbal bullets, respond in a way that is, not only respectful, but very short, simple, clear, and filled with common sense.  This amounts to inviting enemy in, let him shoot at you, and not shooting back? Exactly. The opposite of respect is shooting back and gaining their respect is what is critical to our process of persuasion.

The Best Way

When we take the higher ground. We’re the one who comes off as the statesman. It puts us in a better position for our people to be sympathetic to our idea, to listen to us, to move toward us emotionally as opposed to away. The battle for the emotional heart is everything; gaining empathy and support through the heart is the fastest way straight through the crud.

To be a stateman for our innovations we need an astonishing talent for communicating in humble, simple and clear ways. This is not dumbing down. Rather it just means being able to find the best way for people to grasp an issue. Often the best way includes telling stories.

Tell Stories

We don’t mean half-hour stories, but short ones about something that’s happened either within our group or historically in the company. We need to integrate stories into everything. The most basic way humans learn is through stories. Our stories aren’t just intellectual stuff. It’s not just data. It’s hitting at an emotional level and in so doing we carry the day for our idea.

Gain Support and Win Respect

So after we let the lions in, Kotter & Whitehead  say we can do 5 specific things to gain support and win respect for our cause:

1. Don’t push out the troublemakers; let them in and treat them with respect.
2. Don’t respond in half-hour speeches that try to drill people into the ground with information, but communicate in ways that are simple, clear.
3. Don’t let it get personal, no matter how much you want to lash out.
4. Watch the whole group and don’t get hung up on the one guy who’s attacking you, which is very easy to do.
5. And the last one is about preparation; don’t wing it: lets spend a few hours of brainstorming with our supporters on potential attacks and responses.

Consider the sample 24 attacks above , asking our self which ones we can imagine coming at you in our company.

If we want to gain support for our innovation we need to strategize like generals and win support like a Abraham, Martin or John.