Latest / Complexity Cogitators Podcast / #017 - System or ... Polity
Transcript
- Joakim: Is the word system the best way to describe an organization? When trying to understand and map decision making mandate, the word system falls a bit flat. Recently we discovered the word politu. So that is what we are talking about on Complexity Cogitators today. My name is Joachim von Bronay, and together with Marco Ahumada Juntenon, we try to make sense of organizational behavior. Joakim von Prónay: Marko Marco: You okay. Joakim von Prónay: Think my internal clock is just set slightly faster than yours. Good to see you. Since our last conversation, or in the last conversation, you use you dropped a little seed. You mentioned the word polity. And then you dropped the sentence or a few words. The thing with systems. And we thought we would have a little bit of an exploratory conversation about that thing with systems. And perhaps get in a little bit to systems thinking, maybe a criticism, maybe a praise. Who knows? Probably both. But where have your head been circulating the last couple of days? Marco: Well, for one, I'm not sure if you can hear, but I've got a bit of a respiratory situation going on. Yeah. That's been one of the things, so I apologize for that. Joakim von Prónay: Mm I can hear, so I hope you get better soon. Marco: Yeah, but other than that, I've been thinking about The thing you mentioned, the word polity. like I hinted too in in our last conversation, I I'm trying to review my vocabulary, trying to to think about which well, the heritage of certain words and and what they mean and how I want to use them. So me being the word guy, right? And so it also got me thinking why don't what is it I don't like about the word system? or where do I think it's not enough or to general or vague. So that's been one of the things on my mind at least. Joakim von Prónay: Mm. Yeah, so a little bit. I I feel like it it started w for you with a little bit of criticism towards the idea of systems and systems thinking. And I can kind of jump on jump onto that bandwagon as well. Because for a long time now I've felt like the word system doesn't really capture the essence of what it is that you want to talk about usually. Or at least that's how I feel. and I I think a very the the very very short the definition, description, explanation of what systems thinking is or what a system is. it's a collection of components essentially. But where I would add the distinction is that the relationship or how these components fit together is the more important part of it. So it's not the The traditional, it's not the the the the whole is greater than the sum of its parts essentially. So the sum of some of the parts, the individual components are not an the most important aspect of it, but it is the relationship between the parts. This is how I have viewed systems in the past, but like you, the word system doesn't really hit the mark for me anymore. Marco: For me, the word is one of these extreme abstractions that we use. First of all, I want to point out the thing that you said that composition matters more than its components. Like how they interact and how they relate is what ends up happening in this system or how it ends up functioning or the value it ends up producing. But these configurations can be very different and that's what makes the word system It's a hand-wavy word to point to some collection of things that fit together somehow from some perspective. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, and just and just call it a system. Marco: Right. But the thing is, systems can be very different. a car is a system. I think as the a car as a system is a very useful term because it consists of components that are connected in predefined ways and they do this the thing that they do very reliably. In the renew in the right environment. And then there are other kinds of things that we also call systems, and let's say organizations, except the relations in that system are not fixed. They don't work the same way every time. And yeah, you people come and go in these organizations, yet we still use the word system. And the only thing they have in common is things bundled together. which makes it a lot of the time a weaker word than I think we should use it for. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, and this is how you stumble upon the word polity Marco: Yeah. So it's not a synonym, it's a qualifier, I guess. I use the word human system a lot or organization is another word for it, but if you want to generalize it, a team is a human system, an organization is a human system, family is a human system. but they work very different diff very differently and they have very different Objectives, let's say. but it still doesn't say a a lot about more about it than it's a bit more messy than a mechanistic system might be. So can't remember exactly how but I came across the word polity. which struck me as you know the feeling when you find a word that explains something that you've been looking for some time. because when I was doing it I was thinking about writing about strategy. I can't remember the source that I that I got it from. Joakim von Prónay: I believe well, I believe it's brought up in James C. Scott's th seeing Marco: yeah. Joakim von Prónay: like a state or in his works at least. Marco: Yeah. That might be it. I guess I've been reading that recently. And suddenly 'cause 'cause we've been touching on the topic of things in organizations being political, a word that i seems uncomfortable to use because it a lot of people connect it to electoral politics or partisan politics. But it turns out that a lot of phenomena that we work with in organizations are political by nature. when we would like to treat them analytically. Strategy being one of those topics that we end up in a lot. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. And how would you then just to get my brain going here as well, how would you say strategy is political? Marco: Well, first of all, if we Step back and ask ourselves what is it that we want strategy for? Well, the way I see it at least is we have this bunch of people that we want to do something together, bring bring forth some greater value or I don't know, profit if that's what you're into. But who decides what we're going for or how we should be doing it? 'Cause as soon as you start having people with different ideas of how things should be done or where we're going or why we're doing it, then you've entered the territory of politics. So to me all acts of strategy making is political. And not only that, once you've formulated a strategy, then the interpretations there will be different interpretations of that strategy and these different interpretations they will combine and compete. And it is also a political process whose interpretation wins in what we end up doing. So I think those facts are inseparable. Now a lot of organizations solve this by having a hierarchy of mandates. So you have the CEO who delegates their mandate down into a tree, generally speaking. Joakim von Prónay: Agreed. Marco: So what do you think about that? Joakim von Prónay: So what do I think of that? Well, I share your view that strategy is in essence political for the reasons that you that you proclaim here. And I think you also you were also the one who said strategy is when you the get getting people to do roughly the same thing at roughly the same time with roughly the same resources for roughly the same reason. Roughly. and that is political. And political in the sense of cohabitation or coexisting. and this is also come again. Marco: How do we share this space? How do we share this space? Joakim von Prónay: How do we share the space? Yes. and this is where the word polity fits so well in. Because you painted the picture or you presented the word to me as a I'm probably paraphrasing here, but an autonomous unit with decision making power within a political context. And here, as we just established now, we see strategy in organizations as a political context. So a polity is a group of people that has decision making power. within that political context, that larger political context. Marco: Or rather what we do in organizations is make decisions and compare them to others, our goals, how others might feel about it, or agree with these things. and this is the condition of being in an organization, of having colleagues generally speaking. Right? So you you can't get away from these social relations and actions more or less coherent with what people around you think. So that is life in a polity. And then sometimes you need to make bigger directions that somehow are an answer to your environment or have some kind of structural impact within your group, your polity, then it becomes a lot more apparent that it there needs to be a kind of Shared direction or movement here. Sorry for butting in. Joakim von Prónay: No and no it's perfectly fine. And when when I was when I was thinking about this word and seeing this as a as an autonomous unit with decision making power, my mind immediately went to Delus and Gotari's concept of nomadology and and the state and the war machine as well. So the polity in this sense would be a war machine within the larger political context that is then defined by the state. So the state is also what provides the governing constraints within which the war machine or the polity is then free to make the the political decisions needed based on the context and the situations and so on. Marco: I don't think it's as easy as saying as a polity is a war machine. I think a polity has aspects of both the war machine and the state in how it operates. Like if you're a in a software development team, you probably have a a kind of goal or some kind of strategic framework that informs the decisions you make. So in that sense, you have an interface, a state-like interface, you're being measured in certain aspects of your work, you have a certain number of hours, you have a budget, that kind of stuff that you're gonna be doing. but then there's all of the things between what this striated organizational framework can describe or produce that you need to do either way. And these are the the war machine like aspects of the team, like the improvisation. This is the metis Joakim von Prónay: No, but I I still Marco: Yeah. Joakim von Prónay: yeah, I I I still I still see it as quite a close translation between a polity and a war machine. I I I definitely see a war machine as a polity in in how I view it. And I see that these the the governing constraints or the state like state like characteristics that you describe here, I just see them as the the context. But you're the word guy, so maybe I'm I'm out on a limb here. Marco: I don't know, this word is still kinda new to me and I'm trying trying to explore it and we're just bouncing it around to see. But I'm going to say that even the most state like entities are polities. Like let's say our parliament. you don't get closer to state than that. but they still need to make some kind of decisions Joakim von Prónay: But with that said, I would also add then that a war machine is definitely a polity, but a polity is not necessarily a war machine. that's the distinction I would make. And that that was I was something was a bit incongruent in my thought when I said it earlier as well. And I think that's the that's the dot over the eye I was looking for. Marco: I think any group of humans trying to make decisions, navigating the world and the relationships that they need to maintain in order to do so is going to be a polity no matter how radical or not they are in relation to it. Yeah. So I think that's what I've come away with. Joakim von Prónay: Hmm. and I think you mentioned this last time in the conversation, where this word becomes useful is that it it describes a group of people with shared context in the sense that they are there to make decisions together. And I think this is where it becomes distinctively more useful than the word system. Yeah, because this is where we had as we said in the beginning a few minutes ago, that's that's where we have been struggling. A system doesn't necessarily d describe the the purpose or the reason or anything around the composition of the components that you're describing as a system. But the word polity when talking about organisations is incredibly useful because it is about people that are there to make decisions together. Marco: And the reason I like that it forefronts decision making is because we've been at the word decision a lot of the times through our episodes. back in the Everything is Strategy episode, we went back to Minsberg definition of where strategy is, which is a stream a pattern in a stream of decisions. and I think I've said something to the effect that The strategy is a distributed decision making process. So all of the decisions being made across the organization, they form patterns more or less coherent with each other. so I think that's why I'm drawn to the idea of polity bringing forward the decision making social aspect of it one way of understanding the word system is that it invites us to think about its function in relation to its environment. So a car is a system with the purpose of taking us safely from point A to point B or any adjective. But but it's not so interested necessarily in its operations or Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Marco: the conditions of it. So it's a useful word. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to introduce it into my practice, but I think that's where we're starting here. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, exactly. No, I'm not sure either, but one thing that because we were then in our little pre-conversation here, we were top t touching upon the the idea of systems thinking. And the way I before we dig deeper into that, the way I have applied systems thinking is very very visual. I think very visually. I see images of things. And I usually view organizations or the components of organizations on different levels and different groupings and different abstractions, so to speak. And the word polity describes very well the building blocks that I usually just automatically group up or clump up organizations, organizational structures in. I view these decision-making units as I interpret them. So to me it fits very well into At least inner or mental use of systems thinking. don't know how to use that on the on the outside yet, as you said, but for me the word polity works very well how how I break down and try to understand organizations. Marco: Well it certainly invites a different set of tools. if we were to think about organizations as something that well, if we just write down this policy here and make everyone sign it, then we've changed how this system works because we've changed the rules of interaction. That is ignoring the fact that people are going to have opinions about that. And it's going to work in some organizations and for some policies certainly. but generally speaking, that's The kind of tool that is not invited if you look at a a decision making context being primarily social. Joakim von Prónay: Hm. No, exactly. Exactly. And I think my my head goes back to our conversation with Andesh as well when we talked about governing constraints and enabling constraints. Because those become not the governing constraints, especially essentially the boundaries within which your polity is free to make decisions become very important. And th they are nonetheless important in general in organizations. In my experience I should say, even in organizations that are very heavily managed through governing constraints, they are rarely enforced or made visible or made aware to people before you overstep them. That has been my experience. As an example, like a policy document that you took as an example here. We have now changed the policy for X, where we should do Y and Z. That is a governing constraint. Marco: I have a story here. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to connect, but bear with me because it connects back to politics and rules being invisible. I don't think in this particular case the rules were formal or written down in the sense which to me makes it clearer that is it's not a matter of i it i the political nature of these kinds of decisions. and I was I was in a context we were struggling with recruitment so we we were a bit too few for task at hand so we were trying to grow so we set up interviews we and got candidates into the office and eventually we found this person that we really liked so we went up to the manager and said hey you wanted us to get a person here's the person to which they said no because criteria Y is not true. Okay. So I wish you'd told us that before we started this process. In this case it was about where this person was located. So then we learn there's a there's a policy we didn't know. So we restarted the process and we found another person. And turns out that we'd missed another criteria. this example reminds me of well when we don't have clear constraints or we don't have a a formulated strategy for what is it what it is that we want, then what we have left is political arbitration. and then those who have a position more of power or more mandate will be able to use their personal arbitration. That is a kind of politics then. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, absolutely. I can recall a few similar situation working as an w the y yeah, in some organizations where I made decisions and those decisions were overruled after the fact because there were a few things unknown to me. Yeah, incredibly frustrating. And this turns me to the the other side of this coin, essentially the the person that then sits on higher decision making mandate or political power. Which is also what I usually call one of the hardest problems in modern leadership. How do you create the right circumstances for your people to be successful? How do you create this environment where the people working within your organization that you're essentially accountable for the result of the work, how do you create the right circumstances for an effective or multiple effective politus, so to speak? That's an open question. Maybe something we don't even need to try to answer, because that is one of the biggest challenges of modern leadership, in my opinion. Marco: think we would have to dedicate at least one episode to that. Joakim von Prónay: Maybe we will. Now my head keeps going back to the political context here within which then the polity or the multiple polities operate. And and the essentially successful strategy execution because it's about having coherence. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it is a picture painting in my head that the whole the the goal of this is to create. autonomous decision making or distributed decision making that all result in coherent action. And here back to the conversation we had last time about direction, perhaps I didn't want to use the word direction or alignment. But it's about creating positive benefits for the organization through coherent action. I'm not sure what I want to say with this because it still goes back to me liking the word polity and liking it in the sense that I find it to be a very useful component to describe organizations Yeah, that was my rambling. Marco: I think what I like about the word is that it's not mechanical. It's not a borrowed metaphor from engineering or something like that. And I like how it feels like the way we view it now, it's more of a decision-making context than a defined set of people. So people who happen to be at our workshop or whatever. They are a polity. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, but that's the dynamic nature of it as well that I also like, that it's a decision making context and not a defined set of people. It's not a static group of people. it doesn't immediately go to that description of it. It could be, it could be a very stable, long running group of people or team even, but that's not the main descriptor of it. The descriptor is a decision making context. So members can be replaced and should be replaced. Are your thoughts converging on something? Marco: I think I was just diverging. I was thinking about the times that I've had some kind of course or presentation about systemic coaching I had a talk for an organization about self leadership and autonomy. So in this case Their ambition was to be a manager-less organization, which meant that in that presentation I called it systemic work. So, more or less tending to how does this system interact, which relationships do I have, and how do I make information flow in this organization, which is a kind of mode that is necessary in an organization where that responsibility is not centralized to a managerial, a strict managerial position, right? So that sensibility and that responsibility needs to be distributed. So yeah, for that presentation I leaned on some concepts from a school of coaching called systemic coaching and and that of course put me into the position of trying to describe what a system is. at because at that point to me it was clear what it meant and I've described it a lot of times but it always felt a little bit forced and flat, the word, like I kind of had to bring it to life during that session and that would have been a reason for me to s to reach for a better word. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how many times I've heard the saying you need to coach the system. And I've always, always restrained myself from asking, What the hell do you mean by that? Marco: Right. It's like trying to avoid using the word humans or Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Marco: people. But it but the intent of course is to make the people in these systems, politicians, organizations aware of their relations and their interactions and that these are what shape how things happen instead of locally optimizing for one individual, which is like the least if you if you read the classic coaching for performance book is about unleashing the potential of one individual and that may or may not include systemic perspectives but Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, but that's the limitation on in professional coaching. It is a one to one relationship between the coach and the coachiee. Marco: Now but I was also thinking about going back to like the my origin story coming into this kind of work is closely related to systems thinking and specifically Donna Meadows book Thinking in Systems, which at the time for me was a whole new way of seeing and understanding well organizations primarily. And it gave me a new set of tools to think about these. but it was also n a necessary step for me to f find what I think are shortcomings is a hard word, they're useful, but limitations of that toolbox and the kind of work that I do. And this is another reason why I feel like I want to be careful with using the word system because systems thinking can mean that school of working with organizations which has its uses, but if that's the only way you work with them, I think you're missing out. And and the reason I say that is because let's take two of the tools from from from that book that I've used a lot and I've taught and that's definitely have their place in getting the right conversations going. The first one is stocks and flows, which is essentially you're trying to quantify a system and It could be an industry, it could be an organization, and you you set an imaginary number to some process or concept and then you reason what increases or decreases this this value. So what makes makes more or less happiness or code coverage or whatever number you want to reason about. And then you think about you draw an arrow. A positive or a negative correlation to another factor. So if we have more code coverage, then we will have more or less of variable X or Y. And then we do this and we start drawing arrows and reason around what loops back. And we've created this kind of causal loop diagram. Which is a very powerful tool to reason around well what is it that actually happens, What are factors that influence how things happen in this organization? now this can be a very useful conversation to have in an organization, it will bring forth a lot of insights, but it is essentially a reductionist way of doing this, trying to break down something complex into something smaller that you can manage manage, essentially making a model of something that is very difficult, I would say impossible to model. Now I'm not saying you should not do that. It's like I'm saying I've gotten a lot of value out of it. But if these are the only things you reason about systems, you will start thinking about them as something mechanistic or something controllable. So yeah. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Absolutely. You do similar things when using Lego serious play. Because then you build you build physical models that represent the things that you are talking about. They can also be abstractions and concepts, but you build a model that represents it with Lego. And then you make connections between these different models. And then you have a landscape representing the system. And then you can play with the different connections and how these relate to each other to see essentially that you talked about do we have a positive or negative correlation here between these things. If we pull this thing over here, what happens to the other ones? Essentially the same approach, but very physical, very kinesthetic. and a lot of fun because you get to build Lego. Marco: Can't argue with that. Joakim von Prónay: Mm-hmm. But I I I share your share your entry point into systems thinking because Donna Meadows Thinking in Systems was the first book I read on explicitly on systems thinking as well. But this was also after my university studies, which happened to be a a master's in systems theory and communication theory. Or Information and communication systems. So I had a lot of applied systems thinking tools in my toolbox. But I this was the first time I got exposed to them from a more general point of view. So I had specific examples for most of the things that I got, exposure to through Donna Meadows. But it also opened up my eyes a little bit because then that also helped me to generalize many of the concepts and many of the theories and approaches that I've learned at university, that they weren't only applicable in that specific context or in that specific situation that you learn in the school bench. They can be generalized and applied in many, many, many cases and many situations. So that was a bit of an eye opener for me as well. Have you come to any conclusions after this exploratory conversation, Marco? Or are you still diverging? Marco: well I do feel like I am converging. It feels like a a hard word to bring directly into my practice, given that it feels a lot more theoretical than is usually or at least right now asked of me in my role. I think this is something that's going to show up more in writing or I don't know, some kind of talks where I'm allowed to go fluffy and theoretic and abstract. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Marco: The word polity of course. Joakim von Prónay: Exactly. I have the same feeling. It's I feel like I'm converging with my thoughts a little bit as well. And I still hold that I like the word and I like what it describes in my way of viewing and looking at organizations. But I also see an immediate pushback if I were to start using this in a professional context because it is so heavily heavily tied to the word politics, which usually comes with a very negative connotation in organizations. So let's see. Where it goes from here. Maybe we have to make up our own word for an autonomous unit with decision making power. Or maybe there's another one that we haven't found yet. Marco: Yeah, maybe someone who's listening to us knows well. Then reach out and let's talk about it. Joakim von Prónay: That would be lovely. That would be lovely. But with that said, Marco, thank you for the conversation. Marco: Thank you. A pleasure as always. Joakim von Prónay: Until next time. Marco: See you around. Joakim von Prónay: Chao. Thank you for listening to the whole episode. If you enjoyed the conversation, please consider leaving a review and sharing the episode with at least one other person who you believe will also enjoy it. It truly helps us reach more people. And if you don't follow us already, please consider subscribing to our Substack on complexitycogitators.substack.com. And if you have a topic that you want us to talk about, drop us a message. We are more than happy to receive suggestions. Bye for now.