Stage-7: Co-evolving with Society

The world consists of wholes (i.e. identities or systems) with an internal structure (i.e. interrelated elements); and these wholes are themselves elements of larger systems.

So: an organization is a dynamic structured entity with a developing identity, interacting with other related organizations and its social environment, and obeying systems laws.

■ When placed in the same system, different people produce similar results.
e.g. ► this applies with the decision approaches.

■ Today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
e.g. ► this captures the futility of much pragmatism.

■The harder you try, the greater the resistance.
e.g. ► benefits gained from applying a new mode has a limit beyond which degeneration results.

■You are actively shaping your reality even if it seems that things are happening to you
e.g. ► the degeneration of each mode usually feels as if it is an external force.

■ Fundamental (i.e. systems) solutions cause temporary stresses and costs.
e.g. ► the work to understand this framework so as to strengthen management.

■ There is no such thing as a free lunch… but you can often have your cake and eat it.
e.g. ► creating a culture of inquiry to support intense pragmatism.

■ The fundamental cause is always the system.
e.g. ► the decision approach you use can cause the very problems you want it to solve.

● Recognize that everything connects.

● Build positively on the ramifications and inter-relations of problems, issues, values and actions within and without the organization.

● See through overt trends or patterns of behaviour and find causes in underlying structures of relations and the interplay of forces.

● Strive to see your contribution to anything unpleasant that seems to be happening to you.

● Think of the effect on the whole when making important decisions for parts.

● Use multiple, varied measures of success.

● Take community relations seriously.

● Rotate managers to broaden their perspective.

● Think hard before you export difficulties, risks or bad things.

● Aim for balanced development.

● Stop seeing decisions as disconnected events and start seeing them as part of evolving processes with potential alternative trajectories.

● Adapt to, and benefit from, evolving trends in the wider systems of which your organization is a part.

● Create futures for the organization that mesh with these evolving trends.

● View the organization as an organism with an inherent potential for growth through learning.

● Unblock self-directing and self-organizing forces to achieve the organization's proper place in its various wider communities.

● Value continuous improvement and progressive approximation to ideals.

● Act by intervening in an ongoing process, to modify an evolving trajectory, so as to produce a desirable future scenario.

● Get leverage: work smart not hard.

● Stop always tackling immediate or obvious causes or doing what everybody automatically does.

● Identify the really critical factors and unmodifiable constraints in any situation.

● Focus your action on trigger points which release widespread change.

● Interrupt homeostatic patterns or vicious circles.

● Do not view interventions as single decisions or simple plans, but as flexible inter-related responses which synergistically support each other.

● Learn from about choices and events from their effects: both wanted and unwanted

● Back up interventions with contingency tactics.

● Use a reflective and collaborative form of inquiry and learning.

● Work in teams to elicit, clarify and refine each other's point of view and current understanding.

● Recognize the limitations of facts, trial and error, and gut feel.

● Reject unreal simplifications and welcome challenging thinking.

● Use tools like mind-maps, systems archetypes, holistic frameworks and interactive computer technology (simulations).

● Give up pseudo-explanations of messes based on blame—whether of individuals, objective realities or external forces.

● Stop slavishly imitating «best practice» without understanding it or the context it needs.

● Dialogue, inquiry and learning, especially team learning, depend on the use of a common language.

● Stop tolerating confused contradictory terminology if it is evident that staff are being disoriented and time and energy wasted.

● Build the language on realities (rather than the reverse) and treat it with respect.

● Take essential ordinary management terms (e.g. budget, line-manager, strategy) and define and qualify them unambiguously.

● Apply terms consistently.

● View the language as a tool to bolster organizational solidarity and identity.

● So induct all staff, especially newcomers, in the language.

● Use the language to extract the best out of new management fads and fashions and to prevent them destabilizing and confusing staff.

● Use the language to speed communications and improve the transfer of learning.

● Ensure everyone becomes acutely aware that the organization is part of society, and that the staff are part of local communities and, indeed, humanity.

● Be guided by ultimate values, communal ideals, social responsiveness and responsibility to harness the maximum of external and internal support.

● Recognize that all choices have ethical implications.

● Emphasize rights and duties.

● Value each person's dignity and autonomy.

● Insist on civility at all times.

● Understand the importance to people of continuity and coherence when changes are made.

● Ethics remains a form of enlightened self-interest, but self-interest here includes the intangible inner spirit and identity of the organization and its staff.

● Strive always for personal mastery and recognize its spiritual roots.

● Establish habits of integrity and self-reflection.

● Expect to have to modify your own ways of thinking and relating, because self-development at its outer edge blends into identity change.

● Accept that unrealized inner potentials are part of distinct personal identities. (The different decision approaches are a typical example of disparate mentalities.)

● New mentalities can only be appreciated by deliberately entering new worlds of thinking and feeling while preserving inner integrity. (How did you experience the seven mentalities offered here?)

● A trusted guide is usually needed to assist such a transformation.