Problems, Systems Thinking, Appreciative Inquiry

We should be suspect whenever someone points out a problem with some organizational system. For example, someone noting that the centralized recruiting team is not in close touch with the business units--with the implication that we should decentralize.

The "problem-centric" approach generally pays too little attention that any organizational system (program/policy/process/design) has many pros and cons. If you change the system to fix the problem you are just migrating to a different system with its own pros and cons.

Senge of course is famous for encouraging systems thinking but it can be hard in daily mgmt life to use his ideas. A simplified approach is found in Barry Johnson's "Managing Polarities". The basic idea is that if we simply recognize that what we are dealing with in organizational systems are polarities to be managed, not problems to be solved then we are less likely to get into passionate but pointless arguments or worse, swing wildly between different systems forever focusing on the problems each one produces.

(I remember Farouk in Hay Malaysia telling me "In HR you can't solve problems, you can only move them around.")

However, my thought of the day is just to note how Appreciate Inquiry (AI) is inherently more systems friendly. You might think it just inverses the narrow "look for problem" view with an equally narrow "look for success" view. However, what's different is that the problem-centric view encourages often uninformed tampering with a system, whereas AI seeks to extend existing systems.

AI may not consciously understand systems any better than those who are problem-centric but they don't have to, they just try to nurture the thing that works even if they may not understand why it works.