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Part II. ApplicationIN this second part I explore some implications of the model for facilitating change and stability in human systems. Specifically, I will address the following questions:
- What is the relationship between stability and change in human systems?
- How do system levels interact with and affect each other?
- How can this framework be used for understanding and intervening more effectiuely in human systems?
Change and Stability in Human Systems
EACH of the eight system levels - from subselves through the global society (see diagram) - has structures that provide continuity and stability. And each level is also a potential source of change - within itself as well as at other system levels. At the level of the individual, for example, the structure of personality is generally regarded as being formed relatively early and to be rather stable for life. The tendency to be introverted or extraverted, for example, is likely to persist beyond the acquisition of skill or knowledge.
At the level of the organization we can identify those patterns of corporate culture that are characteristic of an organization, such as valuing risk-taking and innovation or a tendency to rely on hierarchy and authority to maintain control. New products or procedures may be relatively easy to develop and introduce, unless they are somehow in conflict with the organization's culture. When a major change program is implicitly at odds with the culture, it is often just absorbed and cancelled out, much the way a good boxer rolls with a punch.
In similar ways, the family, the work group, the community, etc., all have fixed core characteristics as well as a capacity to respond to pressures and opportunities in their environment. A family may cut down on entertainment or vacation expenditures in response to reduced family income during a recession thus maintaining their family structure. In effect, any open system survives by its ability to change some aspects of its structure or behavior in order to maintain stability in those areas that define its core identity.
There is thus a paradoxical relationship between change and stability in human systems. While change is carried out in the service of stability, as a means to that end, it is change that generates energy and attention. Its purpose, however, is often forgotten. An organization's mission and culture become the tacit context for day-to-day operations and tactical adjustments. In effect, there is a figure-ground relationship between operations and mission - between daily activities and culture.
Figure and Ground
THE Gestalt psychology frame work is useful in this context (Kohler, 1970). Figure refers to whatever aspects of perception or experience are currently in the foreground of attention, while ground refers to everything else around it. Ground serves as the context for the figure, and by its relationship to figure, gives it meaning. Changes in either the figure or the ground, or in the relationship between figure and ground, result in a changed gestalt - one that has a different meaning. In a human system there is a tendency for attention to focus on its responses to pressure and opportunity, and to take for granted, even forget, those aspects that are stable. Only under unusual circumstances do we stop to consider questions such as what the core business or mission of the organization is, and whether that mission might usefully be modified. The same is true for organizational culture. As the fish who are unaware of the water that defines their existence, we can be suprised to learn how our shared values and beliefs define our organizational reality.
Core characteristics of a human system thus tend to be both stable and unconscious. They are so important that the system works hard to maintain them intact. But their very importance leads to strongly held values and assumptions about them. They so define the system's sense of identity that there is no room for any consideration of alternatives. We assume that ours is the right, even the only, way to be and stay busy with day-to-day events. Only when that core identity becomes untenable or is threatened in some way do we seem to wake up to its existence. And we often react with great energy to such threats, either with creativity and learning or with anger and defensiveness.
A community may exclude people who seem different and incarcerate law-breakers, even execute them in extreme cases. An organization may deny employment or promotion to people who are not "team players," or those who are not sufficiently competitive and aggressive. A work group may ostracize members who produce too much. A family may "ground" kids who break curfew rules or don't achieve high marks in classes. A couple may fight over a lapse in behavior, especially when it is related to basic values: "I know that if you really loved me you wouldn't have done that!" In each of these systems, the behavior and reaction to it are in the forefront of attention, the figure. The causes for the reaction - those tacit goals, values, and assumptions that frame and provide meaning for the behavior - are the ground.
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Interaction Among System Levels
THE gestalt of figure and ground can be formed either within a level, or between one level and another. When clients talk to us about the need to develop faster cycle time, the figure being presented is at the level of the manufacturing unit, let's say an assembly plant for electronic equipment. If we work only on that level we join the client in the frame of reference that created the problem. We may be able to help restructure operations within the plant to eliminate bottlenecks, miscommunication, and inefficiencies. But this approach is limited.
We can instead engage with members of the client system in a process of inquiry aimed at identifying the unspoken context for that problem, e.g., the community of customers who want better service and a faster response, competitors who have found a way to provide what our client doesn't, and suppliers whose policies and procedures limit the client system's flexibility. Members of the client system have not been able to resolve the problem because they are assuming that it must be solved internally within the plant.
But much like the creative problem-solving exercise requiring one to connect nine dots with four straight lines, the solution is only precluded by the limitations we assume to be there. And these are the most powerful and difficult limitations, because they are self-sealing, we have created them through an assumption we've made, and we are not aware that we have done so. We are caught in a false-logic trap; one that cannot be resolved from within the framework that created it. Only by shifting one's point of view, by standing outside the situation in some way, can the larger picture be apprehended - the whole figure-ground gestalt. This is probably the most powerful contribution of any consultant, the fresh perspective of the outsider.
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Using the Human Systems Framework
FOUR decades ago, Cartwright (1951) wrote about the tendency of "changes in one part of a group to produce strain in other related parts of the group" and to therefore precipitate efforts either to eliminate the change or to bring about readjustments in the related parts. He further quoted Lippit (1949) as suggesting that "change should always involve three levels, one being the major target of change and the other two being the one above and the one below."
This perspective seems central to the emerging paradigm for Human System Redesign. Rather than a narrow focus on the organization or the team being developed, the HSR approach requires an inclusive, wide-angle view of the figural system, the contextual systems that provide the background, and the figure-ground relationships among them. This is especially crucial in change efforts that touch core elements of a system, such as its personality or its culture.
System change can involve simple reactive adjustments in behavior or more complex proactive changes such as learning, changing work structures, or redefining the organization's mission. In certain critical circumstances the fundamental character of the system may be transformed. Simple changes can take place at one system level with little or no effect on other levels; moderate change tends to have consequences for other levels, which must adjust and compensate appropriately; fundamental change reverberates at all levels, causing crises and precipitating either pressure to return to the previous state, or evolutionary leaps into new ways of functioning.
When members of a human system experience difficulties and decide to ask for help, they tend to present the figure situation that is troubling them. HSR consultants assist the client system to regain awareness of the ground within which the problem has emerged, and then to facilitate new ways of working with the problem, the ground, and the relationship between the two. This is the essence of the Human System Redesign process.
For consultants and managers involved in facilitating fundamental change it is imperative to maintain an awareness of the ecological relationship among system levels. Every intervention must be assessed in terms of its impact on adjacent levels. HSR must be managed as a multi-track, multi-dimensional process. At the very least, one must maintain awareness of possible consequences on other levels. It may even be possible to intervene in such a way that positive or facilitative effects are felt at several levels concurrently.
This would seem to call for a super-human level of awareness and skill on the part of consultants. What really makes the HSR approach practical, however, is not the consultant's ability to manage and control the whole process, but rather the inclusion of all relevant stakeholders as equal co-facilitators of their own process. For what I am describing here is nothing less than the redesign or reconstruction of consensual reality, in other words culture. And this, I believe, can only be achieved cooperatively and communally.
While it has been popular in recent years to focus on culture change in organizations, the results have often been disappointing or worse. Few interventions seem to rile people more than for managers or consultants to attempt to change their culture for them. The critical error in such efforts appears to be the assumption that a command and-control culture can change to an empowered culture by using command-and-control assumptions and methods. What HSR offers instead is an approach that uses consensual methods to facilitate the self-organizing evolution of culture. As suggested earlier, this involves processes that:
- Bring together relevant stakeholders within and across system levels,
- Create a collaborative context for surfacing assumptions and for considering the structural and technological (etc.) implications of the shared culture.
- Facilitate creative transactions and negotiations among stakeholders aimed at redesigning or reconstructing aspects of their shared culture.
Implications for the Practice of Human System Redesign
GIVEN these requisite elements, what are the implications for the way consultants and clients manage the change process? What issues and questions are raised?
1. Contracting needs to be even more thoroughly and flawlessly (see Block, 1981) conducted than in other forms of consulting. Managers who expect to use HSR to secure their command-and-control power will be disappointed. They must understand, instead, that they may gain a new kind of instrumental power, one based on being part of a more effective, adaptable, and satisfying human system. But along the way, they will likely experience some loss of control and some confusion and anxiety akin to culture shock. They will need to generate and maintain a high level of commitment to see the process through.
2. A sequence of activities may be planned, but it is very likely to change along the way in response to emerging events, contingencies, and shared discoveries. Instead of the familiar and apparently logical sequence of data-gathering, analysis, and problem-solving or redesign, there is likely to be a less linear, more iterative process of exploration, deliberation, and dialogue among people in multiple configurations. The paradox is that when assumptions and shared views of reality are being reconsidered, progress is likely to be experienced, at least at first, as confusion, anxiety, and loss of meaning. Participants need to be prepared for this and to support each other through the difficult times.
3. Working with culture requires a capacity to deal with issues and dynamics that are complex, subtle, challenging, and paradoxical. How do we discover and work with, for example, the complex interrelation between organizational structure, compensation policies, group norms, interpersonal dynamics, individual beliefs, attitudes and feelings, and production technology? How shall we assess our values and criteria? Our learning, as members of any human system, is only now beginning and will need to continue.
4. Personal authenticity, openness to experience, and interaction process skills are even more important in HSR than in other intervention methods. In the soup of co-construction work, there is no "us and them", no distinction between subject and object, certainly no place for a consultant to hide. Whether internal or external, s/he is an integral part of the systemic wholeness. The capacity and willingness to be appropriately open about perceptions and feelings, and skill in communicating directly and non judgmentally, are primary and requisite areas of competence.
5. Consultants need to expand their capabilities and to form consulting teams that provide complementary skill areas. Working on three or more levels simultaneously requires a heightened level of awareness, understanding, and skill. An intervention that leads to the creation of self-managing teams, for example, is likely to have unsettling as well as liberating effects on both the teams' former managers and the team members, even precipitating some degree of personal crisis for some. At the same time, the organization's reporting procedures, reward systems, and control procedures will no longer be appropriate and will need to be fundamentally redesigned. This complex interdependence among system factors calls for an expanded array of competencies and a redefinition of the education and training for consultants. We simply have to know more about more topics. We also need to form consulting teams representing a wide spectrum of knowledge and capabilities that can respond to the client system's multi-level issues and opportunities.
A Concluding Note
THIS essay is more a beginning than a finished statement; more an invitation to shared exploration and collaboration than a manifesto. I see in this framework the possibility of an integrative dialogue among all of us who work to improve the quality and the sanity of human systems. Whether we work with organizations as consultants, with individuals as psychotherapists, with students as teachers, with communities as leaders, or with people as people, we can share the struggle to understand the complexity of multi-level human systems, and to facilitate those changes that will support human values in a sustainable and stable global society. To do this well we need, I believe, to travel together along a steep learning curve, because the needs and the challenges are growing exponentially. And we need to help and support each other in the co-constructive redesign of human systems at all levels within this fragile yet wonderfully resilient world.
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Saul Eisen, Ph.D. is Professor of Management and Director of the Master's Program in Organization Development at Sonoma State University. He maintains a consulting practice with a wide variety of client organizations throughout the U.S. and abroad. He speaks fluent Spanish, likes to write and to mentor new consultants. Write him at SSU, 1801 East Cotati Avenue, Rohnert Park, CA 94928. E-mail: Eisen@Sonoma.Edu
©1994, SAUL EISEN. PH.D. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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