Changing an Organisation’s Culture with Systems Thinking

Abstract

This research has studied three aspects of a multi-method Systems Thinking intervention in a large Service Organisation. Firstly, an experiment studied its effectiveness in terms of changing the leaders in the organisation thinking. The second and third aspects looked at issues relating to success and sustainability of the programme, specifically, the major system conditions and the level in the organisation at which there must be an understanding and acceptance of Systems Thinking. Analysis of the experimental results showed that the intervention had started to cause a change in thinking, from command and control to systems thinking, in the experiment group relative to the control group. However, the change could not be shown to be statistically different between the beginning and end of the experiment. Observations made throughout the intervention identified two major systems conditions threatening the success and sustainability of the programme. The first system condition relates to multiple parties competing for the role of the customer across the organisation, e.g. the service user vs. shareholders, who are owned by different parts of the organisation. This results in different parts of the business having different, competing purposes. The second system condition relates to the link between business and individual measures in the current world, which are anchoring the organisation in the command and control way of thinking.