Lessons from a Public Emergency

What lessons can we learn from the Pandemic about the need to see, think and act systemically? We can all agree that as the world becomes more interconnected and faster changing. BAU needs to confront and metabolise increasing levels of uncertainty, change and more frequent system shocks. Organisations therefore need to develop the capability to sense and respond in more collective and systemic ways to the environment in which they operate. Whether it is a political/military crisis in Ukraine, the arrival of a new variant or socio political crises in increasingly agitated and polarised populations, the need to adapt to fast changing situations is key to the survival and fortunes of today's institutions.

Systemic responses to the pandemic

Here in the UK the national responses brought out the best of many organisations but also revealed their underlying fragility. The historical focus on optimisation and efficiency has caused many organisations to struggle or fail due to low levels of operational resilience and bottlenecks to international supply chains. In contrast, the sudden mobilisation of both public and private sector organisations to rise and adapt themselves to the challenge of the crisis was unprecedented.

Empowered by new communications technology, remote working solutions were able to be deployed at a hitherto unknown pace and scale. Faced with a crisis of such great magnitude - ?academia and the public and private sector came together to deliver perhaps the greatest of all successes - the development and deployment of national vaccine programme in timescales previously thought impossible.

Why is thinking and acting systemically so hard?

The Covid pandemic caused most organisations to stop what they were doing, recalibrate their strategies and change at pace. For the first time many organisations found themselves at the front line of national emergency leading them to engage in collective purposeful action in service of the common good. 10 years of digital transformation in frontline healthcare delivery occurred in a matter of weeks. Legacy bureaucratic processes and constraints were swept aside in order to free organisations to respond to what needed to be done.

How can we think and act more systemically as a matter of course? Why does it need a crisis to provoke cross silo and inter-organisational working at scale? Is there a risk that the legacy mindsets will pull us back into old siloed practices and thereby lose the transformative insights of working in a more systemic manner towards shared goals? Will we become once again become slaves to narrow, short-term bureaucratic and organisational priorities that blind us to the possibilities of mutual collective action?

How do we fill the systems thinking capability gap?

In a rapidly changing and uncertain world old models and approaches that assume stability no longer work. Linear cause and effect relationships cease to hold true. The old Newtonian, mechanical and industrial mindset is in need of replacing with one that recognises the need for organisations to act more like living organisms. Ones that can more dynamically sense and respond to their environments by harnessing the full potentialities of their people and mobilising their resources and capabilities in service of creating value for all stakeholders.

This is the new opportunity landscape for systems thinking. For most organisations and institutions however, there is clearly a large gap in the systems thinking capabilities needed. How should this gap be filled?

One organisation seeking to address this is the Enlightened Enterprise Academy. They have brought together many of the world’s leading systems thinkers and practitioners to share insights, tools and techniques to help organisations to address this capabilities gap. There are 2 events I would like to draw your attention to:

1.????The first is a FREE online event Mind the Gap: Overcoming the Dangerous Systems Thinking Capabilities Gap featuring Rupert McNeil and Dr Mike C Jackson OBE This online event will take place online on March 10th from 3.30pm GMT. FREE TICKETS https://lnkd.in/eCEnyHNk. This event will explore the need for systems thinking, provide a good introduction to different systems thinking approaches and explore why we still have such a serious systems thinking skills gap.

·??????Rupert is the UK Government’s Chief People Officer and has been leading the way in bringing complexity and systems thinking into the heart of Government and the Civil Service.

·??????Dr Mike C Jackson OBE is one of the world’s leading experts in complexity and systems thinking and was central to the founding of the Centre for Systems Studies. He is also the originator of Critical Systems Thinking which seeks to identify the most appropriate systems thinking approaches for particular kinds of problems.

2.????The second is an upcoming 12 module course entitled Critical Systems Thinking for the Management of Complexity. This starts on May 10th and will be delivered by Dr Mike Jackson and Paul Barnett. This is a specially designed course for Executives and Decision Makers in order to equip leaders with the skills needed to deal with increasing complexity and ‘wicked’ problems they face today. The course brochure and booking details can be found here

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