Means and Ends – what are our organisations and institutions for?

What is going wrong with our current system?

There is a growing consensus that we find ourselves in a growing meta crisis – in other words a crisis of many different simultaneous crises. Our organisations and institutions are not up to the challenges that we are facing and our politics, economy, society and planet seem to be careering into a more uncertain and dangerous future. How should we approach this challenge? Is it a case of tinkering with our current legacy organisations and institutional structures or is something more fundamental rethinking required?

Our addiction to short term priorities, financial metrics and policy fixes mean that we often find ourselves trapped in the bubbles of legacy structures and thinking. The result is that our gaze is often focused inward into our organisations trying to optimise what we already do…. rather than casting our gaze outward to see what our rapidly changing society and civilisation is calling from us. Until now our organisations have focused almost exclusively on their narrow self interest, but now it has become abundantly clear that we all have a collective responsibility for the world we are all complicit in co-creating.

Means and Ends

One way of framing this is to cast the net wider when considering how we might respond to the current situation. Means and ends thinking is helpful here. Many organisations and institutions see themselves as a set of processes (means) to deliver a set of outputs (ends) – namely a collective organised to deliver a set of products and services to customers/ users/ patients/ citizens in service of a set of financial and quality metrics.

If we take a step back at look at things from a more fundamental perspective another means and ends perspective comes into view. The very reasons we have evolved our organisations and institutions in the first place was in the belief that our society would benefit from coordinating action at scale. The creation and distribution of things/ services/ ideas set in a network of agreed relationships provided a societal and economic system aimed at developing and enriching the civilisation that we are all part of.

In this radically changing world however, we need to look again at what developing and enriching the civilisation means now we are a in time of growing crises. Many of the core assumptions that drove our older frameworks and worldviews no longer hold. A linear materials economy based on both extracting natural resources and then turning them into pollution/ trash faster than the planet can process them is clearly bonkers.

?An economic system predicated on perpetual growth and maximising financial performance drives incentives that accelerate the generation of harmful externalities. The game theoretic consequences of every organisation and country maximising financial returns further accelerates more 'races to the bottom' and 'tragedy of the commons' outcomes.

What if the ends that our organisations and institutions are seeking to achieve were recast into something greater? i.e we were to look beyond maximising internal delivery metrics to focus on something greater - creating real value for the world? Value defined not in the thin financial extractive sense but value that captures the much broader and more holistic meaning the word was originally conceived to convey. Looked at in this way the notion of value can be broadened out to encompass a definition of what each organisation contributes towards a sustainable and widely shared prosperity measured in terms of human and planetary flourishing.

Can a new theory of value re-orientate systemic transformation towards a better future?

If our organisations and institutions are to step up to the plate and take responsibility for creating real deep value how might this be done? Is this all wishful ‘tree-hugging’ thinking that has no place in the ‘real world’ of institutional settings and board rooms and hard-nosed decision making?

This is where means and ends thinking can be of great help. If organisations and institutions are to create real value in the world they must offer something that has meaningful utility and value in the context of the lives of the customers/ citizens/ patients that they serve.

Framed in this way the means equals the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of what organisations do to deliver value to those they are there to serve. The ends are their ability to create meaningful value in the lives, goals and purposes of those they serve. The better an organisation is at succeeding in sustainably creating value for those they serve, the more successful organisations and institutions are likely to be.

3 Horizons of value – a journey of transformation

Getting from where we are to a organisational and institutional system more closely aligned to the needs of a flourishing society and planet is not going to happen overnight. How might we go about this journey of change? There is much theoretical and practical work to be done to build the frameworks and tools that will assist us on this journey.

It will helpful to lay down a high level framework that could help to outline the contours of this journey of change. This builds on the 3 Horizon innovation and culture framework developed by Bill Sharpe and eloquently elaborated in this article. All horizons 1, 2 and 3 need to be pursued in parallel but represent the short, medium and longer term perspectives that must dynamically coexist in organisations seeking to break free from the tyranny of the short term towards a longer term transformed future.

Horizon 1 – orientating today’s organisation around a value creation perspective

At this level it is important to reframe traditional product/service delivery into a means and ends framing thereby identifying how the organisation/ institution creates value for its customers/ citizens/ patients. A deeper understanding of how value is created will enable both the ‘what we offer’ (product/service model) and ‘how we offer it’ (engagement/service model) to be optimised and enhanced in service of creating more value. In order to realise this transformation the organisation will need to identify and orchestrate its capabilities in such a way that it also creates value for its other internal and external stakeholders. This is explained and developed further in this article by Elliot Schreiber which draws from his recent book The Yin and Yang of Reputation Management.

Horizon 2 – using a value creation lens to open up new value creating possibilities

Horizon 2 thinking digs deeper into the core problems/ jobs to be done of an organisation’s customers and external stakeholders to reveal how greater, deeper utility and value could be created. This reveals new opportunities for expanding and deepening the service offerings to provide more compelling and valuable and in doing so reveals the new capabilities, skills, working practices, partnerships and economic models that can be harnessed to achieve this.

Horizon 3 – using a meta value creation lens to inform new systemic value creation possibilities

Horizon 3 looks at the meta jobs to be done/ greater longer term societal goals and challenges/ wicked problems and explores how value can be created in service of these goals. This is likely to reveal new visions/ missions around which collective action from a combination of policy makers, regulators, industries private/public/3rd sector actors can coordinate and collaborate in service of creating collective systemic value in service of wider prosperity and societal/ planetary flourishing.

?How do we fill the systems thinking capability gap?

In a rapidly changing and uncertain world there is a need for new ways of defining value and for the new leadership skills required to create deeper, thicker notions of value. Old style linear cause and effect based management thinking can no longer provide the tools necessary to deal with the new world unfolding around us. 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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