Consulting Conversations 8: Systemic Design

'Every system is perfectly designed...to get the results it gets'. As consultants, we aim to change results towards desired outcomes. This requires us to think at the level of changing complex systems. Not merely information systems, but wider enterprise ecosytems. We need to see organisations not as simple machine bureaucracies but as complex social systems - and the larger the organisation, the more complex the system. In Sionic, we have for more than twenty years now, developed and used a powerful systemic design approach to create Visons and strategies for change that modify the key dimensions of organisational performance: Leadership, People, Processes, Structure, Culture and infrastructure Assets. In our experience unless change Visions and programmes are designed across all of these dimensions, there is significant risk of undesirable unintended consequences. In this episode, I share the conversational pattern we use to faciliate this thinking, analysis, and solution design. When people have a better understanding of the system, they are better able to identify actions that lead to desired outcomes.