“Systems thinkers know a number of counter-intuitive truths.”  John Seddon

One of these counter-intuitive truths is that “when you manage costs, your costs go up. When you learn to manage value, your costs come down.”  There is the business case for systems thinking, if one was needed.

Thanks go to David Wilson through his fitforrandomness blog for bringing a presentation by Seddon to my attention.  Makes great watching and listening.  There is so much to learn from this talk on so many levels, but when I was watching the video, I kept making the link to management, leadership and new thinking.  New thinking to me means a new set of assumptions about organisations and how they get things done.

Individual performance management is rubbish.  Not only that, it’s patronising and disabling.  I’ve said it before.  When people aren’t performing, it’s extremely probable that it’s not a behavioural problem; it’s the system.  It’s not that performance management as a concept has been sullied because it’s been ineptly carried out.  It’s just that it’s pointless and in some cases counter-productive to actually getting good performance.  Deming’s 95% percent rule.

Sure, some people are not performing well enough.  They aren’t doing their tasks.  They are not meeting targets.  Targets.  That’s another, connected conversation.  Stop looking at the individuals and look at the whole.

from “The Ruins of Detroit” by Marchand and Meffre

Why would the whole of the Universe be a complex, self-organising and interdependent system, and a business be a top-down, controlled machine?  Why would the entire Universe be subject to the laws of Nature, and business, not?  It’s almost as some businesses they think they exist in some bubble, where the laws of nature are turned away by some bouncer: “You can’t come in here with that gravity.  Second Law of Thermodynamics?  Not in here, sunny Jim.”

So the world didn’t end on December 21, surprise, surprise.  Here we are in 2013, all systems still intact.  I have heard some speak of the Mayan December 21 end-of-all-things-prediction not so much an end of the world, but more of an end of one cycle and the beginning of another.  An end of things-as-they-were.  Let it be so.  Endings can be good and healthy.

I don’t do New Years’ resolutions per se, but I have resolved in myself to focus this year on health, from its broadest perspective.  I will endeavour to place attention on the health of those around me, the health of the organisations with which I work and the health of those within them.  I will place, firstly, attention on my own health, because leadership is an inside job.  We must be healthy ourselves.  I view health as an holistic phenomenon: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and relational.  This is not merely the absence of dis-ease, but a progressive and thoughtful movement towards greater freedom...