What Would Homo Systemicus Do? The Wisdom Of Viewing Our World Through An Organic Systems Lens

System Love

Systems express their Love by integrating and homogenizing. These are the inward connecting processes, parts working together in the pursuit of common goals, mutual responsibility, the commonalities of system members, their one-ness.

A system expressing its love through homogenization

A system expressing its love through integration

With this language established, we return to our dilemma of Top Teams. We will examine them through this lens of the organic systems perspective.

Top Teams:

Systems coping with environments of complexity and uncertainty

As we’ve said, a Top Team (or Top System) is accountable for the larger system of which it is a part – the corporation, business, project, or family. Top Systems interact with environments having varying degrees of complexity and uncertainty.  There are multiple, difficult, and unpredictable issues to deal with. And Top Systems face considerable ambiguity – issues and decisions for which there are no easy, clear-cut answers: Grow fast or slow? Stick to what we know or venture into new directions?  Be adventurous or cautious? Should our relationships with our employees (or children) be democratic, hierarchic, laissez-faire, controlling?

As the Top System interacts with this environment of complexity and uncertainty a familiar scenario unfolds without awareness or choice. Here’s how it goes:

Phase 1. A Top System enters a space of complexity, accountability, and uncertainty.

Phase 2: Adaptation. The Top System differentiates and individuates.

Complexity  becomes  more  manageable  when the Top System differentiates, when areas of responsibility  are  divided,  and  when  it individuates, when Tops operate independently of one another, managing their separate areas of complexity. This adaptation to complexity is important and of itself is not a problem.  The problem is what happens next.