Published
The recent Association event (Systems Thinking, Systems Leadership, September 2022) made the link between understanding and leading complex systems.
Back in the 1990’s when organisations were embracing the concept of Total Quality, one story sticks in my mind. The CEO who attended all of the TQM kick-off meetings for all of his many thousands of employees. The impact of his presence was very significant and many of the employees when questioned about the content of the meeting months (and indeed years) later were understandably vague on the detail but they ALL remembered the fact that their CEO was there in the meeting lending his support for the process.
Behaviour is the first of the three systems leadership tools that Karl Stewart and his co-authors (Ian MacDonald and Catherine Burke) describe in their book, Systems Leadership. We all know the power of leadership behaviour and the way in which leaders can ‘walk the talk’ and model the behaviour that is needed of everyone working within the system.
Systems drive behaviour, Karl Stewart, Systems Leadership, Second Edition, 2018
Systems is the second tool, not least because, as Karl Stewart notes, it is systems that drive people’s behaviour. We’ve all had multiple experiences of this on major projects. Think, for example, of the way in which organisations have begun to work together in a highly innovative way only for an inappropriate and unthinking approach to contracting to turn what looked like a promising collaborative culture into a defensive, dog-eat-dog, relationship of every organisation for themselves.
Symbols is the final tool in the trilogy. These are the cultural icons that are understood by everyone who wor
ks within the organisation: presentations, awards, letters of recognition, visits, commemorative plaques, office space, furniture, decoration, cars and other vehicles can all have significant meaning. HS2, the symbolic equivalent of the 800-pound gorilla amongst major projects, fully understands the importance of symbols. By trialing electric vehicles and hydrogen generators, the project can champion the adoption of renewables on construction sites and signal to employees, contractors and the public at large, the reality of a journey to Net Zero.