System Thinking and Management

Recently on InfoQ I’ve seen an interesting interview with Esther Derby on System Thinking applied to management. Here I’d like to synthesize and share some thoughts on what she said.

Agile manager must focus on creating the condition for self-organizing team to emerge

A manager should not only develop people and directly help team jelly, in doing so she should look more broadly at the organization level in order to prevent “local sub-optimization” when solving problems. This is really interesting because too often we see a poorly managed solutions - also because of the “hurry” - that solve local problems, but don’t prevent the same problems to reappear late.

It’s not easy. A typical middle manager sits between people he have to support (his teams) and people he have to respond (his managers), moreover thay are generally competing between themselves for scarse resources in the company (manpower, budget).

Team: small in number, common and compelling goal, complementary skills

I think this is a clear and concise definition on what a real team is. Of course is not the whole, but surely a strong starting point to never forget.

Again, managing a team like that can’t be about telling people what to do (of course!), but is about gain an understanding about the structures/patterns in your organization and using them to help everyone to do their work. On this point Esther Derby say and important thing for me:

It’s important for managers to schedule some time for reflection, to schedule time where you can sit and think.

In this sentence we can see a clear behavioural pattern for human beings: to stop and reflect some time, watching from a “distant” point of view what it’s happening. During this time you can more easily see patterns (at the organizational level) and work on them.

I’m sure we can sum up saying that there is a lack on System Thinking - both habits and approaches - in management today.