Systems conference

The UK Systems Society have the annual conference at this time of year, and being interested in systems thinking and its application to business, I took the opportunity to go this year - my funded studentship finishes this month, :( so if I want to do something that costs, this is the last month to claim it. It was worth it because I met and talked with lots of interesting and knowledgeable people about systems, got to know of aspects of systems I'd not heard of before (like Connant-Ashby) and used systems thinking that I'm familiar with.

Systems thinking is a niche with few practitioners, a few small journals with low Research Asssesment ratings and little academic recognition. John Martin from the systems department of the Open University suggested that systems thinking is used in other non-specifically systems and published in other journals, but we don't have the evidence. So systems thinking isn't obvious in the academic literature, but may be applied in practice because we had a number of practitioners at the conference, and a couple of practitioner speakers: John Seddon of Vanguard consulting, and Hoverstadt.

Hoverstadt works in the sort of public sector areas that are relevant to my research, so we had an interesting conversation. His book, The Fractal Organisation, is one that I've been recently reading. He writes clearly, and explains the viable systems model much better than Stafford Beer does. He tutors one of the OU systems courses, and is running a systems workshop on VSM at the OU this month. I'm going to squeeze that in to my last month's funding too.

Systems thinking

A possible reason for IT systems failing, suggests Neil McBride in Computing, is that people don't take a holistic approach to thinking about an organisation. He argues here that thinking systemically

"involves taking into account the complex social mechanisms, the dense networks of interactions, the dangerous and unknown emergent effects. It involves being open to changing one’s way of thinking, listening before advising, being adaptable."

Indeed, it does, but as a reply on the article comments, schools teach reductionism. Reducing complex situations to simple models makes it easier for us to get our heads round the messes, which may be why such models are taught in universities, and especially on MBAs. But when you try to bring in systems thinking, few people know what you're on about, and some people explicitly discard it. Even my supervisor expressed dislike of systems theory.

So how can you bring in systems thinking without explicitly sharing the theory?

Entrepreneurial leading out of recession

The OUBS ran a Leadership Academy Workshop today on entrepreneurs and the recession.

The OU director of research and enterprise, Malcolm Cross, introduced the morning by pointing out that SMEs are restricted in time and money and critical resources, and that HEIs are large repositories of skills.

The first session on challenges and impact of recession on small firms was presented by Alistair Anderson who’d been tasked with the academic understanding of small businesses. SMEs are the leading edge of change, so seeing how they cope with the recession and its impact might suggest how SMEs are leading us out of the recession. An FSB survey of small businesses allowed self reported performance. The bad news was that 41% thought they were doing badly and of those 25% thought things were going to get worse.

Findings:

• The major finding was the flexibility of small firm owners
• Another finding was the high level of staff loyalty.
• The recession had a lower impact in Scotland and the north east than in the rest of the UK.
• Reactions were to cut prices, take out 3rd parties, offer discounts, require bigger deposits from customers.

The future requires working smarter. Small firms will be the leading edge out of the recession because of their flexibility.

The second talk on Business Link came from John O’Reilly, from East Midlands Regional Development Agency. THE RDAs’ remit is wider than business support because it includes responding to economic shocks, and there is a portfolio of over 20 products that provide support, business transformation grants, business health checks and training.
In future, strategies are about building a new economy, creating the right conditions for growth and targeting key sectors, such as digital, low carbon, advanced manufacturing, whilst continuing to monitor success.

The third speaker, Steve Kempster, addressed issues of leadership in SMEs who started by posing the question:

“How do we learn to lead?”

And is leadership a person, a process or the output?

To answer it, he suggested that people practise in a particular context bringing in a combination of skills together with their influences on attitudes, values and assumptions, and that these attitudes themselves influence context skills and practice of repeated everyday activities. Consequently leadership has a salient meaning depending on the context. An entrepreneurial context disables how we learn leadership, which is through opportunities for observation, accesses to notable others, partnership. Such opportunities are available in the employed context, but to the self employed the concept of leadership is of tainted management, so is avoided as not salient.

Steve commented that owner-managers tend to identify with their profession or trade. So if leadership is important, then it could be measured it though a shift in identity and how much leadership becomes salient through networks. Networks enable, facilitating support and couch, not telling people what to do.

The question and answer session revealed the emphasis of the three speakers to be on

1. Flexibility
2. Available resources
3. Salient networks.

What did I get from it? The talk on leadership was the most inspiring and the most valuable to me. Perhaps this is because he had a systems perspective on leadership, or perhaps it's because some of what he said about values, attitudes and integrity matched some of the attitudes I'd noted in interviewees when I asked them how they'd got their teams to engage. It's not something leaders think about as they do it, and one of my interviewees had recently had such success that his organisation was analysing how he'd done what he'd done and getting him to speak to others. He wasn't quite sure, but talked about values, behaviours, attitudes and honesty. That's what lead that organisation out of potential recessionary disaster.

Constructivism in information systems

Mingers writes and edits on social theory and philosophy in information systems. For example, on shaping of technology (SST) and the social construction of technology (SCOT) (sounds like a take-off of Berger & Luckmans 'Social construction of reality'). They criticise "the predominance of technological determinism" (page 332).

In Minger's book, Probert reviews Theodor Adono's work because it "assists the critical researcher in devising apposite research strategies". Probert comments:

"in Adono's view the subject does not make the world up (this is often termed 'constructivism')"

Constructivism is how a person understands the world, has made it up, has constructed it. It's a metaphor of building. These parts fit together, something cements them so that together they build something. Again in Mingers, Howcroft et al consider terminology indicating that constructivism includes strands:

• actor-network approach
• social constructivist approach
• social shaping approach
• systems approach.
  

But each strand causes debates. For example, they mention weak versus strong constructivism. I'd not read of the contrast before - so there's more for me to read up.

Mingers work is fascinating, enjoyable and relevant to IS in general. However, the research I'm doing is more about people, management and business than technology - it' s just that people and management are situated in a technology context - I'm not sure that technology influences the client-consultant relationship and therefore the literature on social theory and philosophy technology is not sufficiently relevant to my research.

---

Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1971). The social construction of reality : a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Mingers, J. and L. P. Willcocks, Eds. (2004). Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems. John Wiley Series in Information Systems, John Wiley.
"The phrase 'social theory and philosophy for information systems' invites an examination of following terms: social, theory, philosophy, information, systems, information systems, philosophy for information..." (more)

Learning & systems

Fellow PhD student in OU systems department is writing about learning conversations. I've been to his presentation, and thoroughly enjoyed his diagrams and pictures, though it sounds like an attempt to change the world, because he's talking about Habermas and Popper, philosophy of science and ontological worlds.

I don't really understand yet how he is going to put this into research practice.

Formal Systems Paradigm

I'm convinced that what my supervisor #1 has drawn matches the formal systems paradigm (FSP) [1].

A system has four aspects to it:

1. a purpose
2. an interest from someone who perceives it as a system
3. components that interact and do something
   
4. if any one component is removed or added then the system behaves in a different way
   

The FSP has components:

• a purpose
• sub-systems that are systems themselves and do things
  
• a decision making process
• a performance management process
• an environment
• a boundary
  

What sup#1 has drawn includes

• a decision-making system that consists of client civil servants and politicians (possibly as a separate system),
• a consultant system again with possible subsystems
• a system for effective consultancy with notes against it about how consultants add value, how it's measured, and contribution to project - so it must be a performance management system

Then she's drawn a boundary round these three components and put stuff in the environment, like:

• other projects or across projects or programmes
• nature of projects in public sector
• life cycle
• nature of consultant engagement
• more effective project outcomes influenced by market shift and clear outcomes.

So where do I go with this? She doesn't like systems, so I can't go there without explaining a lot. However, I think I could write up each of the components in turn, citing the literature to arrive at a similar diagram. Then each component of the diagram brings aspects of my research question. Erm.

What is my research question?

How do clients engage with consultants in order to ensure effectiveness of the consultancy contribution to the overall project?

---

Fortune, J., Peters, G. and NetLibrary Inc. (1995) Learning from failure: the systems approach, Wiley, Chichester ; New York. 773

Risk again

I had a meeting with Geoff Peters last week, who pointed out a couple of relevant PhD theses by OU people. One of them is on risk: Diana White, "A systems view of project management risk", 2003. How am I ever going to put together as coherent a thesis at this? It’s about 400 pages so physically not easy to read.

At last supervision, a suggestion was to look up risk analysis tools as well as to follow up systems failure methods, so I'll have a good look at Diana's thesis. However, I have to make sense of the difference between risk analysis tools and project management risk.