New School IT ™
Is your enterprise struggling to reap the full benefits of AI at this stage of your Digital Transformation? You're not alone, and we can help!
Old-school IT philosophy is to treat the AI business transformation as a one-time project, and unfortunately, that just won't work.
Welcome to New School IT, a Podcast dedicated to the conversation that will set your Data and AI journey on the right course.
Join us and learn the power of how a systemic approach to disciplined agility can drive game-changing Data and AI digital transformations!
New School IT ™
SYSTEMS - tiny sparks, big flames
"Complex systems that work have invariably evolved from simple systems that worked." This powerful insight anchors our season finale as we explore how system dynamics determine the success or failure of transformation efforts in organizations of any size.
Why do most change initiatives fail? Because they attempt to overhaul complex adaptive systems through structural changes alone—new processes, new managers, new org charts—without addressing the system's fundamental purpose. As our panel of experts reveals, a system's true purpose isn't what we claim it to be, but what it actually does. And systems fail reliably by doing what they've evolved to do best: repeating familiar patterns.
Through illuminating examples from companies like Procter & Gamble, Netflix, Google, and Verizon, we unpack four counterintuitive principles that can help you navigate complex systems. We examine how System Dynamics predicts that successful digital transformations either small or driven by a bold leader with a new purpose, how hierarchies can either enable or obstruct performance, and why functional boundaries are not as effective as purpose-aligned structures.
Whether you're leading a transformation in a risk-averse enterprise or trying to inject speed and agility into parts of your business, this episode provides mental models that can help you work with—rather than against—system dynamics. Our panelists share personal experiences from the frontlines of organizational change, offering practical insights applicable to leaders at every level.
As we close our first season, we leave you with a powerful framework for approaching change: understand the system's current purpose, start small when building something new, and recognize that meaningful transformation requires more than superficial restructuring. The path to sustainable success lies in aligning purpose, paradigm, and practice in ways that embrace both discipline and agility.
started small hands in the dirt, building systems that will just work. They learn, adapt, survive the storm. Puppers foe a new form, so does the purpose change the game. Small sparks grow into flame, so does the fire, so does the name.
Speaker 2:Hello, this is New School IT. How can I help you?
Speaker 3:Hi, welcome to Episode 6 of New School IT's podcast, the last episode of our first season. Today we discuss how system dynamics can make the difference between failure and success, not just in IT or digital, but in any system. I'm Roland, host of this podcast, and I'm joined by my friends John Nasheed and Ryan.
Speaker 4:Hi everyone, I'm John.
Speaker 3:John is our entrepreneur. Hi, I'm Nasheed. Nasheed is our engineer.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, I'm Ryan.
Speaker 3:Ryan is our sales guy.
Speaker 2:We can help.
Speaker 3:Our goal today is to shift your mind with four key concepts from systems thinking, from the reasons why complex adaptive systems must start small, to how paradigm and purpose not change. Management is the most effective approach to change outcomes from any system. Whether you're leading a transformation of a highly structured, risk-averse enterprise or trying to inject speed and agility into parts of your business, we'll give you counterintuitive but proven mental models that can help you make the system work for you. Let's go. Okay, before we get into our panel discussion, here are a few grounding thoughts. This will only take a few minutes. First, we want to be clear for our listeners that in SOTA, system is not what an engineer would call a technical system. We mean system science, which is related to all complex adaptive systems. That's a thing. Cas and examples of complex adaptive systems might be human bodies, global finance and trade, urban traffic and colonies and beehives, as well as companies or specific functions within a company. For this episode, rather than discussing all aspects of system science, we would like to focus on four ideas that we think are interesting for anyone working on AI and digital programs in large companies. Okay, the first one A complex system that works has always evolved from a simple system that worked.
Speaker 3:The flip side of that is also true. A complex system quickly erected from a central design never works as intended and can't be patched up to do so. A quick real-life example Big, successful companies started out as small, messy startups and grew into complex systems that self-organized to be stable and consistent and that are made of structures like hierarchies, rules, processes, technology, facilities, budgets and also people. In other words, unless your company has intentionally made discipline and agility part of its purpose think Netflix or Google it has grown into a system whose purpose is I'll put this in emphasis minimum deviation and maximum repeatability. Minimum deviation and maximum repeatability the main objective is predictable stability, and much of that is achieved through automation, standardization and compliance. The people who succeed in that environment are the ones setting the culture of the company. So successful, complex systems started small. Keep that in mind while we talk about the next idea.
Speaker 3:The real purpose of a system is what it actually does, not what its intentions are, and systems, because of that, fail reliably from doing what they do actually best. In other words, any system has evolved to efficiently repeat familiar patterns, even if those patterns cause failure. So here's an explanation that anyone in a corporation will recognize. A the company's hierarchy has evolved to serve the top, which, in system science, is proven not to be ideal. Over and over again, it has been proven that self-organizing teams who respond to real-life events outperform top-down command and control structures that follow a central plan every time.
Speaker 3:B corporate structures like org charts, rules, processes, seating charts even create boundaries around functions rather than purpose, think silos and handoffs. These isolated functions and the top-down hierarchies limit the flow of information and knowledge. Because of that, all employees, at any level, make decisions with limited information, limited knowledge and limited time. And because of all of that, culture and rewards and punishments have evolved to heavily favor compliance with the very structures that cause the problem, creating a vicious cycle. In other words, doing the wrong thing the right way, doing the wrong thing the right way.
Speaker 3:By the way, how much your company suffers from this rigidity is often related to the larger system around your company, meaning its industry. Some, like healthcare, finance or government, are super compliance. Heavy Manufacturing has to be rigid about zero defects. Utilities have to be rigid about perfect uptime. On the other end of the spectrum, you have creative industries and retail, especially e-commerce, that natively thrive in constant and fast change.
Speaker 3:This example segues to the third scientific idea. In a complex system, altering the structure modifies the behavior, but usually not the results. We've all lived through this New process, same result. New process, same result. New manager, same result. New rules, same result. New org chart. New consultant, new tools, same results. That leads us to the last guiding principle for this podcast A new paradigm or a new purpose changes the results most effectively.
Speaker 3:Going back to one of my favorite examples in business Blockbuster and Netflix, if you think about it, they both served the same purpose they provided rental movies. Blockbuster's paradigm was you come to us, and because of that they built thousands of strip mall warehouses with millions of VHS tapes for pickup. Netflix's paradigm, from day one, was we bring it to you, first by mailing DVDs and then, eventually, by streaming it directly into your television. Even if Blockbuster wanted to go into streaming, because of high rents, declining income and huge debt, it couldn't have done that. Any of the decisions that led to all of that, at the time that they were made, seemed like good and reasonable decisions, but systemically, at the end it proved to be a fatal combination. Okay, so quick recap of these four thoughts before we go into Q&A and the panel discussion. One a new system has to start small. Two a large system is really good at defeating change. Three spot fixes in large systems won't change the results. A new paradigm or a new purpose will.
Speaker 1:Please hold. Go to the purpose, change the game. Small sparks grow into flame.
Speaker 3:Okay, who wants to ask the first question?
Speaker 4:Not really a question, roland, but definitely a reinforcement. I do remember that when I set up my SaaS business because my background and the background of many of the other board members was blue chip, fmcg, cpg businesses we started by trying to think like we had in these big businesses, ignoring the fact that we didn't have the structures and the organization and the resources of these big businesses, nor did we have the customer connection really solid enough to be able to sort of start to think about operating in that way. And it slowed us down for the first few months and I had to make a very cautious decision take a step back away from that way of thinking, the way of thinking, that corporate way of thinking, and focus all our resources on just one thing what do our customers need and want?
Speaker 3:Even in a large company, in a CPG, where I've been doing SOTA implementation, the only time we've actually been successful is not by flipping this massive switch with huge investments and large armies of people, but by starting out really small, with a handful of people. That got it right and then from there you grow it and it stays right because you have to be responsive to external factors as it grows.
Speaker 2:Can you back up a little bit? I'm just curious. When you say starting small, what does that exactly mean? Size of the people that you're implementing Soto with? Mean Size of the people that you're implementing Soto with.
Speaker 3:And then second question after that is why do you think that works, starting small? So a really esoteric answer to that would be one of my favorites, though I geek out on this stuff A few years ago I read a book on innovation.
Speaker 3:The author suggested that the best example of innovation in the world is evolution System. Right, humanity is a system, so humanity didn't start with eight and a half billion people on the planet. It started with small little tribes here and there that figured out how to use tools, and then they ended up figuring out how to use language. So in a corporate setting it's similar. If you have 500 people we did this at Verizon at one point we had a startup with over 500 employees in it already and the system was self-organized around its purpose. And at Verizon it's a utility company. It's a utility.
Speaker 3:Perfect uptime is really important and there's a lot of Six Sigma changes, the enemy sort of initiatives that are very powerful within the company, because, when it comes to the service, you don't want to experiment, you want to be very reliable. However, starting a business in that culture proved to be impossible. I'm not going to say not easy, it was impossible. We ended up buying small companies and kept them separately, and then that grew into what now is known as Oath, including AOL and Yahoo and Verizon Digital Media and all kinds of other things. But it had to grow from two or three small businesses. Oh wow, because fail fast, fail cheap. You're not going to know what makes the system successful unless you do it and you learn from it. And those lessons at a very large scale are prohibitively expensive and are usually not learned very quickly.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 5:So if leaders are supposed to design, call it side systems and each leader takes that approach, how does that scale? Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:scale. Does that make sense? Like I am in marketing and I build a technology site system and somebody in sales does theirs and somebody in supply does theirs. So, without being able to predict the exact, specific version of how it would evolve, I would submit that it would evolve much, much better than trying to have one central organization that tries to do everything for marketing, everything for sales and everything for supply.
Speaker 5:The reason I asked that question is I'm thinking as I'm listening, and it presents a new working model for how leaders drive value within an organization. And that's what that's what I'm hearing, because I, as I'm having conversations with leaders, there's always this resistance to change, as you mentioned, from the big system, and I think many people are programmed to kind of try to support the larger system and haven't really grown adept at how to create their own size system. And I agree with you. I've seen the most innovation, most success from small teams that are kind of insulated in a way. They call it shadow IT. It's like, hey, I have the resources, I need the tech and the skills to do something and we're going to make progress, build trust, and the more people who see that group being successful, the more support they gain. I mean, it's almost dependent on the leader, right, that's what I've seen. It hasn't been something that I've seen widely adopted as a strategy, like, hey, I need to come into the organization, I have my own system that I'm going to deploy to be successful.
Speaker 3:So I think it has to do with by the nature of your job. You get called in by companies who haven't figured out how to do this themselves. So your perspective on this conversation is with companies that need that help. But there are companies that know how to do this Google, netflix. There are companies at that scale, hundreds of thousands of employees. Amazon is one of the world's largest employers and they run warehouses that are extremely automated. They have a service that is extremely automated by AI, right, but they also have a team culture that says more than two pizzas is not a team anymore and you need to break that up.
Speaker 3:I've also heard Jeff Bezos say I need to be involved in the meetings where the real conversation happens. I don't want to get a PowerPoint that is stripped of all the real problems so that I can feel good about it. I want to be in the mess, all the real problems, so that I can feel good about it. I want to be in the mess. So that's the culture. You can maintain it. So this culture of disciplined agility. What we're saying is not it's got to be small always. All we're saying is if you don't have it, you got to cultivate it from small. You can't flip a switch and make the entire company suddenly act that way.
Speaker 3:Like in healthcare, it's extremely regulated. It is very compliance-driven. Everything from how they treat your data to what's ethical, to what's permitted, to the laws, the audits I mean you name it the complexity of a hospital. So when you have an environment that is that client-centric, you don't want to go in and experiment with new medications on a patient. You can't have that experimentation mindset. But on the other hand, if my product display page on Chewy needs to change, that is literally a change that I can make in minutes and nobody dies right. And if I don't like it and it's not working well, I change it again. So the iterative nature of digital is at the opposite end of the spectrum of very, very compliance-centric industries.
Speaker 5:That makes sense to me.
Speaker 1:Please hold, so does the fire, so does the name.
Speaker 4:Just to be a little provocative, I've seen incredibly big levels of change in multi-country organizations, multi-division organizations, created by your second principle, which was changing the purpose.
Speaker 4:An example I'd give would be Procter Gamble through the 80s and 90s, where one of the senior leaders in particular, ed Arts, went on to become chief executive, put a program in place called Strengthening Global Effectiveness and fundamentally he understood and convinced the rest of the company that this was the case, that future performance couldn't rely on the US quite in the way that it had and that future performance would come from global competitiveness and that required a different business model to happen.
Speaker 4:And that program Scent and Global Effectiveness was a multi-year program. It took a long time, it had some missteps along the way, but it ended up delivering into Procter Gamble, an organization that was a matrix organization that was much more agile, where a lot of the rework that was clogging up the system was eliminated. The business also eliminated was the 25% of products SKUs that were never going to contribute to growth. They just weren't profitable and they didn't deserve management attention. So I think that the degree of change you can aim for depends on how big your purpose is and the change in purposes and how much sponsorship you have from senior management. I think you can then achieve very big changes.
Speaker 3:With that new purpose, it becomes possible to actually change the behavior in the system, which is also necessary. And the structure that is called the system, with rules, people, processes, technologies where the money gets spent, decisions that are made, actions that are taken, all of that aligns to the new purpose. Once it has done that, it becomes very difficult to change that again unless you change the purpose again. Yeah, and what's interesting is, in our conversations we make it very clear. We start by saying here's the purpose, but in many systems you don't actually recognize what its purpose is. Very obviously. It's always easier in hindsight. At the time that the leader came in, everybody thought that they were doing the best possible job and they were winning. This guy goes no, you need to be a global company, and I bet you not. Everybody was actually convinced that that was a good change. John, did you have a lot of resistance?
Speaker 4:Yes, I must admit I was one of the resistors, because the change happened at a time in my life when, you can imagine, I'd just moved home to go into head office. In moving home, I'd trebled the amount of debt my wife and I had, and then we were expecting our first child. And then you throw all of the change that was happening inside the company and part of British humour is to sort of subvert everything, really, basically. So strength and global effectiveness became known as say goodbye everyone. And as I thought back about it many, many years later, I just remember all of these things coming together and creating an awful lot of uncertainty for me. Remember I was a relatively junior manager at the time? Yeah, and it was only when I sat down and reread what happened through that program and then reconnected a lot of the positive stuff that I ended up doing as a result of Strength and Global Effectiveness, I started to feel much more positive about it. But at the time it was just another one of the very difficult things I was trying to manage at one time and I think later on in my career I got some training in change management and one of the ideas from a chap called Darrell Connor.
Speaker 4:I got some training in change management, and one of the ideas from a chap called Darrell Connor, who was a leader in change management, was that people absorb change like a sponge absorbs water. Every sponge may look the same size, but they have different ability to absorb water. That's the first thing. The second thing is that you could pour water in the sponge, socks it up, and, eventually, though, it becomes saturated and the water just spills out of the sponge. It can't take no more, and the important thing about change is that it's changed wherever it comes from. It goes into your personal sponge.
Speaker 4:So my sponge was already full with home, baby, new job, et cetera, and for all this other stuff to come in made it very difficult for me to sort of cope with, and I think that what I learned from it was two things. One is that if companies are going to go through big changes, you need to have anchor points, things you can trust, the principles of the company, the ethics of the company, those sort of things. And then, secondly, you can actually train yourself to be a bit more resilient, or you can train other people around you to be a bit more resilient, and so change is something that you can build your strength in managing, but at that time I didn't feel that way. To me, I have to say.
Speaker 5:I haven't been a part of many organizations that have such a clear purpose, John, I mean that seemed like it came from the highest level. When we're talking about implementing these types of systemic changes within departments, how do you all, have you all experienced anything that has happened at a department level?
Speaker 3:I would say that when talking about the AI transformation or the digital transformation or technology transformation that we have been discussing in the podcast, in my opinion, IT could be a function that drives that change.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it could be. I mean, and I'm thinking that is a purpose People say, hey, we want to implement AI. I think people struggle with identifying the purpose and in some of the organizations we're working with, I'm seeing leaders who, quite frankly, I think are unsure what their job is and what that looks like in reality.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's go back to what you just said. What's the purpose? My immediate thought I will think about it differently, building it. It's not its own purpose. It's like saying I want to make money as opposed to I want to provide value for something that I want to get paid for. Right, the purpose of IT should be to have a disciplined agility, speed of operating at the edges. So with demand functions and supply functions, sales and marketing, purchasing raw materials and everything else, that's where, at the edges of your company is where you get to hit hardest and that's where you have to have that disciplined agility to keep performing. Okay, that's the speed that you need to have there. Two-speed system In the center. If I'm a phone company or utility, I'm a manufacturer, that's a different speed and automation is really really important there. So highly automated, very predictable, very stable, stable predictability is on the same spectrum as disciplined agility for a different purpose. That purpose will be pursued with the current system behaviors.
Speaker 5:Right.
Speaker 3:So I've landed on the two-speed system.
Speaker 4:Just a build. In response to the first question is that, yeah, leadership can certainly be at the CEO level. It's also possible to provide leadership at the much smaller level within a smaller team, but that requires someone to step up and be prepared to set a new agenda, even if that means going against the grain a bit inside the business.
Speaker 5:Please hold. You mentioned something about hierarchies and silos being a challenge. I hear that, but I can't help but thinking systems would be more effective if they were intentionally designed to integrate with the larger system. So, thinking about what John said around Procter Gamble having that initiative coming from up top, and I'm always thinking about how organizations can intentionally connect the dots across these different teams. So we talk about unifying silos versus breaking down Some organizations it makes sense to be siloed, but if we're not thinking about how to connect those dots, I think there's a missed opportunity.
Speaker 5:And I've seen organizations for example, they built out a web app. They said, okay, well, this is designed for the sales teams, but why can't we connect marketing information or HR information who controls the sales team's commission structure, et cetera and design something that creates a virtuous cycle of innovation but also value that's basically being given to the organization. But it took leadership saying, hey, everybody needs to go into this particular platform, but it was something that was forced first and then the features that supported the different teams came afterwards. So the hierarchy top down in that case was a good thing, because now people had to do it, but how they actually gained value from that particular platform had to be designed in a way that you've kind of mentioned, so nuanced answer.
Speaker 3:What I feel you're doing, and how you're talking about it, is applying systems thinking to the situation, which is thumbs up. That's what we want leaders to do. So hierarchies are not a bad thing innately. Our hierarchies can be a very useful thing. As a matter of fact, systems, when they grow and become bigger and bigger, will create hierarchy. The problem with hierarchy becomes when it stops serving the bottom, when the hierarchy flips and the bottom now serves the top. Over and over again.
Speaker 3:There's scientific studies around this. It is not the best way for the system to perform and it could be one of the reasons why the system ultimately fails. So hierarchy as a structure of a system, there's no good or bad to it. It's like electricity Whether you use it to kill somebody or to light up your house, your choice. But there's a good way to use hierarchy and there's a bad way. And if you're aware of systems thinking and you can read the case studies and you can figure out how to do it right in your organization, then you use hierarchy for the right purpose and good things start happening.
Speaker 3:Same with boundaries you have to draw boundaries around the teams that built this stuff One way to draw the boundary that we call silo is the work was done separately, by function, as opposed to saying I want to create a team with two salespeople, two marketing people, two people from the supply chain and those six people, I want to put together with the designers and the developers, 12 people and they're going to figure out the first tool that they're all going to agree is going to provide a major difference to the business. The boundary of that system, the boundary of that structure, is by purpose, not by function, will produce much better results.
Speaker 1:Please hold.
Speaker 2:I'll never forget. I was working for a decent-sized company financial district in New York and when, 2001, we saw the first plane hit, we were like, oh, the first thing they did in New York. I've managed a lot of the servers. My boss calls me in and number one, instead of saying happy birthday because that it was my birthday, he actually just said. He said listen. He actually said if our system, instead of servers, if our systems go down, can we still exist? And I said, of course. I said you know, our backup is in Delaware. We tested it. But it's funny as a leader, that's the first thing he thought of. Like, can everything keep running? It's funny as a leader, that's the first thing he thought of.
Speaker 3:Like can everything keep running? So I think your example is interesting in a lot of ways. A it's your birthday when the towers came down and you were right there watching all that. That's a whole different story. That's not happy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're bringing up a technical system that was probably because of compliance reasons, had to be built to be resilient and it's almost a flip side of what Masheed was saying earlier. When you start a conversation with an engineer about system, the conversation typically revolves around things like single points of failure, resiliency. There's a number of topics that will go into system design when you're talking about servers, networks and software. The internet originally was developed as the ARPANET. For that reason, any server to talk to any server over the network. So the more servers, the more resilient it became. Technical systems artificially are to be made like naturally evolved systems.
Speaker 5:You know it's funny I'm asking questions this time versus like having a whole lot to say. I'm asking questions this time versus like having a whole lot to say and it's because I've come out of these conversations a little bruised and battered. And I had a conversation a little while ago with someone who, when they heard system, they thought, hey, we already have our system, we have Databricks, we have a data. And the conversation kind of ran into a role. But it's like hold on, we're not talking about your internal systems, like it manages the other systems and and it's almost like to you said that resistance to understanding hey, within the bigger system, you still have to have a system that delivers results, that actually does something.
Speaker 3:If I'm talking to a technical audience, the first thing I want to do is call it CIS. I want to give it an acronym that they don't understand. They're going to ask well, what does that mean? But that's going to separate it out from their minds from I run an Azure tech stack with these tools and that's my system, right? That's not what we're talking about. We're calling it CIS. And what's that? Complex Adaptive Systems. Humanity is one. A rocket that ships something to Mars is one. And then you calibrate the conversation about what you're actually talking about, which is the company as a system whose boundary we just decided to call company, but that actually operates in an even larger system. We call the industry, which operates in an even larger ecosystem. We call the world economy, right? So when we talk about system, that's what we're talking about, not technology. Technology is one of the system elements that gives it structure.
Speaker 1:Please hold, so does the fire, so does the name.
Speaker 4:One of the things I think that leaders, at whatever level, need to get their head around is that there's a system as you might write it down on a piece of paper and then there's a system as it actually is in real life, and they're very different things very often because people make up systems and people don't conform to what's on the bits of paper. Let me give you an example of that. Again, I'll use a real company example because it's well documented. In 96, a long time ago, pepsico had to take a special charge of $580 million for write-offs and restructuring in Pepsi International, and I was part of that business and I loved being part of that business. It was a really very exciting place to be.
Speaker 4:One of the contributing factors and now I'm offering a personal opinion rather than something that's documented was a program called High Performance Leadership, and High Performance Leadership was about getting your executives to reach further. There were some ideas in there, like raising the bar, bending the trend, thinking outside the box, and executives were encouraged to do just that, and I'm sure that when High Performance Leadership was put in place, it was about strengthening company performance by strengthening executives. I'm sure there was a really credible reason for it. But it became subverted by people like me, the individuals in the business, because we quickly realized that the bigger the bet you made, the more likely it was to get noticed, and the more likely it was to get noticed and the more likely it would be to be accepted and you would often get promoted long before the bet got executed. So if it didn't work, that was someone else's problem.
Speaker 4:If it's John Maltman doing that in his part of the world, that's not a problem. But if you've got loads of executives all over the world making these bets and moving very, very quickly, the average time job was about 14 months. You had people rotating through jobs, getting multiple promotions on the back of these big bets. And then what happened in 96 is and systems theory talks about, this is a tipping point was hit when problems started to create and then they cascaded and that's why suddenly it went from being a great place to develop as an executive to a business that was fatally flawed in the way it was running and causing the international part of the business to take this loss. I think that's part of the challenge for executives to figure out what's really happening and why is it really happening. And it may be that sometimes the answer is calling people back to the real purpose, away from this made-up purpose of executive development that kind of superseded the real purpose of creating a sustainable, profitable business. Purpose of creating a sustainable, profitable business.
Speaker 3:So there's two things that we didn't discuss in the idea section the setup, but feedback loops are a really important mechanism in systems, right A reinforcing feedback loop, and they can be catastrophic.
Speaker 4:And reinforce the behaviors. Yeah, absolutely yeah, and massive companies have failed because of things like this Also.
Speaker 3:massive systems have failed. Because of things like this Also, massive systems have failed the mortgage meltdown in 2008,. The dot-com bust a decade earlier.
Speaker 1:Systems that because of a vicious cycle ended up going out of control and ended up collapsing. Please hold.
Speaker 5:I really appreciated working alongside leaders, who signifies the discipline, the agility and the clarity of purpose and there's a communication style that I think is often overlooked to basically be able to articulate the type of value you're delivering so that the company feels comfortable, even if they're uncomfortable with their approach. They're comfortable that they understand why you're doing it and what you're trying to accomplish. When I'm thinking about systems, I'm thinking about as we're kind of wrapping up this particular season when we're talking to leaders who are listening to this what do you want them to take away?
Speaker 3:The simplest one is you should really pay attention to systems thinking. So if you haven't exposed yourself to the ideas around systems theory there's a lot of material out there Like I found an MIT course on systems thinking that it's available online and you can take for free If you go down one level. To an engineer, I would say the problem statement is you need different results from the system. If that's the problem you're trying to solve, then it is useful to know that by changing the structure you will change the behavior, but you will not change the results, and there's plenty of examples and plenty of research to suggest that that's the truth. And if you internalize that as a truth, then it changes the strategy that you're going to adopt to actually make the change happen, Because you know you're going to hit your head against a proverbial wall until it's raw and bloody and change some behaviors but not actually get the change that you need. So that's one takeaway. The second takeaway is the fastest way to get there is to change the purpose. So how realistic is that? What's your position in the organization? So if you're in the C-suite and you're a bold leader not everybody in the C-suite is, by the way then you can change the purpose of the system and that'll make the change faster than building something, because when you have to build it, you have to start small. The structural changes will change the behavior, but not the outcome. If you need a different outcome, change the purpose. That'll be the fastest and most effective way of getting there. If you can't do that, don't expect to start big. Expect to start small and give it the time that it needs. Expect to start small and give it the time that it needs.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening to the last episode of our first season of New School IT. If there's one thing to take away from today, it's this the outcomes from complex adaptive systems don't change just because you reorganize or add new tools. They manifest from their purpose through sometimes surprising behaviors that emerge as patterns from countless constant interactions and flows between all elements of the system. We hope today's episode gave you a fresh way to think about system behavior, leadership and the role of IT. We do have a little bonus footage to celebrate the special episode, so stay tuned for another moment. Until next time, don't let the role of IT. We do have a little bonus footage to celebrate the special episode, so stay tuned for another moment. Until next time, don't let the system defeat you. You guys want to say see you later to the audience.
Speaker 4:I think that's a good idea yeah, First of all, thanking you three for being part of this with myself over the last few weeks. I've really enjoyed it. I love the different perspectives. It's forced me to think through a lot of stuff and I really do hope that we've connected with leaders out there, at whatever level CAO down to project leader in a way that is helping them to get on with making transformations.
Speaker 5:I echo the same John. This has been phenomenal. Working with each of you all. This has been being able to meet Ryan and John along the way. This has been very eye-opening, very educational. A lot of the questions I'm asking I'm really listening for answers that can help inform how I do things. So I imagine those who are listening are also gaining similar insight as well.
Speaker 2:So it's been a been a enjoyable yeah, I want to say thank you very much. You know, just for being part of this is like, especially as me as the sales guy. You know, it's just like it's really cool to be I posted something like this. It's cool to be behind the curtain, like you guys are the people we are always trying to meet with. I enjoy like all your stories. That's like that's my favorite part. So like all the stories are just so rich and it's cool to see everything from your perspective. Yeah, so thank you.
Speaker 3:I feel like it worked out, the plan worked out, definitely, exactly. People't see me, you guys see me smiling from the heart.
Speaker 5:Thank you. It's been great, been a blast. Thanks everybody. All right, thank you, take care. Bye.
