|
WEB SITE |
For Java Browsers: For Non-Java Browsers: 
|
Communities as Systems Peter R. Scholtes Scholtes Seminars and Consulting 3 South Pinckney Street, Suite 724 Madison, WI 53703 SUMMARY Dr. Deming’s introduction of systems thinking and his system of profound knowledge provides us with a radically different perspective on every aspect of life. Here we will explore the application of systems thinking to community life. KEY WORDS Systems, systems thinking, community, Deming, system of profound knowledge. When W. Edwards Deming spoke to the Japanese industrial leaders in 1950, he urged them to see their whole country as a system (Kilian 1992, page 10). Their nation was an interdependent whole which would survive and prosper, he claimed, if it worked together. But, he warned, if the Japanese competed between themselves, they would not raise themselves up. In 1991, I was privileged to attend an international conference held in Moscow (Bemowski 1992). At this conference—The World Experience for the Soviet Economy—I read a letter from Dr. Deming to the industrial leaders of the (about to be) former Soviet Union, the 5,000 people gathered in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin itself. Dr. Deming’s message to the Russians was the same as his message to the Japanese over 40 years earlier: You must see yourselves as a system. "No country need be poor," he wrote in his letter to the Russians. "Japan has no natural resources …. Yet Japan made its economic ascendance by good management. The top management of Japan learned in 1950 to think of the whole country as a system, every component of which would contribute to the system. A component is not judged by some competitive measure, but by its contribution to the whole system." Dr. Deming has left the world a legacy that is still insufficiently understood. His philosophy—if it has any relevance at all—applies not just to business. Deming’s philosophy applies to all the institutions of society and life. Followers of Dr. Deming sought to nominate him for a Nobel Prize for peace, not economics. In their view, Dr. Deming’s legacy went far beyond business and the economy. At the heart of Dr. Deming’s philosophy is the concept of systems. Your workplace is a system. Japan is a system. Russia is a system. We live in systems. We work in organizations, and we reside in communities, states, and nations. But if our leaders don’t understand and lead systems, our organizations and communities will forever falter and probably will not survive. We must learn to see ourselves as systems (Deming 1994, Chapter 3). I propose that the next phase of the Quality Era will be an emphasis on the community as a system. This is a timely notion for two general reasons: 1. The current direction and dynamics of the quality movement—business, industry, service organizations, education, healthcare, and government—needs a booster shot. It is my belief that a major inhibitor to the quality movement has been the isolated nature of the efforts. At best we have local networks and users’ groups. What we don’t have much of are continuous, concerted, coordinated, multi-organizational, public-private, cross- jurisdictional systemic activities that view the needs of the community as a system of needs and respond to those needs with a system of efforts. 2. The current and foreseeable political tenor seems, at best, to delegate programmatic interventions downward to state government which in turn delegates downward to local government. (At worst the movement is not one of delegation but mere abdication.) All this represents a dramatic change in the process of government and a dramatic reduction in available funds. However this trend works its way through the political processes and whatever the outcomes, this is clearly a time to rethink how communities will work. Re-inventing government is an attempt to do some rethinking of government. However, I suggest that the needs cannot be met by rethinking government alone or by itself. Communities must see themselves as systems. Government is only part of the system. It is the whole system that must be rethought, not just government. What does it mean to see a community as a system? Let’s explore two systemic problems. JUVENILE CRIME A kid gets in trouble, let’s say vandalism. How does the community respond? • The police deal with the crime itself. • The courts deal with the judicial response to the crime. • The social workers deal with the various social-service needs of the youthful offender and his family. • Drug and alcohol problems or any health problems are referred to clinics, rehab centers, detox centers or back to the police. • Financial problems are referred to the welfare office or unemployment services. • Truancy is referred to the schools. Lack of success in school is sent there also. • When all else fails, there are churches, community centers, relatives, friends, or neighbors. Regrettably, this describes communities functioning at their current best: multiple resources, multiple interventions. The youthful offender and his family are divided into "compartments." Often, however, the different community agencies act at cross-purposes and have contradictory demands. As a result the kid in trouble is dealt with as a "case," a singular event in a huge caseload dealt with by whichever agency representative in whose presence the young person sits. The net outcome is overburdened caseworkers and a kid whose problems are neither prevented nor detected and dealt with early and effectively. The kids and the rest of the community become cynical, resigned to the inevitability of the community’s inadequate response. The secret is not to increase the present level of caseworkers. Increasing a dysfunctional response is not the solution. Creating a new systemic response is necessary. "Let’s make toast American style," Deming once said. "You burn. I’ll scrape!" When we fail to look at systems of community needs and problems, then we will never look at systems of community responses. Rather than systems to prevent problems, we deal with individual events and aberrations usually when the problems have progressed from relatively minor incidents to chronic major problems. And we usually respond as isolated agencies in fragmented ways. LEARNING Another example of a systemic problem is our communities’ need for effective learning. What does it take to be a learning community (an expanded sense of Senge’s "Learning Organization")? We have educational agencies and institutions, from head-start through graduate school and adult education programs. Sometimes these educational organizations are focused on learning. Often they seem to be focused on something else: sports and recreation, credential-granting, test-passing, teaching—but not learning. What would a community-wide system of lifelong learning look like? Greenwood, South Carolina is currently engaged in a community wide effort to create systems for lifelong learning. This is not something to be delegated to the schools. Learning is too important to be left in the hands only of school people. In Greenwood the lifelong learning initiative involves the school system, the business community, the chamber of commerce, the local government, the local college, healthcare professionals, … the entire community. For instance, because research has shown a correlation between birth-weight and the ability to learn, Greenwood’s approach to a system of lifelong learning begins with pre-maternal education and nutrition programs. Our educational efforts—often called "systems" though they are not systems—produce many defects. "Remedial" education is the school equivalent of "scraping burnt toast." Teaching may take place, but learning does not. Greenwood, by seeking to create a system of learning, involving a collaborative effort from all the communities' resources, may help the rest of us learn how learning must happen. (For more information, contact the Piedmont Excellence Process (PEP) at Box 980, Greenwood, SC 29648. See also Senge 1994, pp. 502 ff.) SOME STARTING POINTS IN THINKING ABOUT COMMUNITIES AS SYSTEMS First: Think differently Dr. Deming would urge us to "adopt a new philosophy." Indeed in his final intellectual legacy he provided us with the system of profound knowledge, a lens through which we can look at the world around us. The system of profound knowledge consists of four important disciplines and areas of insight and the interaction and interdependence between them (Deming 1982). Figure 1. Deming’s system of profound knowledge. 1. Understanding systems Understanding the organic nature of society, the living, interacting, interdependent nature of life, communities, and events. When we don’t understand systems: • We will see things as individual events rather than the net result of many interactions and interdependent forces. We will see symptoms of problems, but not the deep causes of problems. • We won’t know the difference between prediction, forecasting, and guesswork. • We won’t know when our expectations are realistic. • We will be less likely to distinguish between fact and opinion. • We will not understand how an intervention in one part of the community can cause havoc in another place or at another time. • We will blame individuals when those individuals may have little or no ability to control the events around them. • We won’t understand the ancient African saying, "It takes a whole village to raise a child." 2. Understanding variation There are various indicators—"vital signs"—of our community’s health and well-being. These indicators give us a profile of multiple dimensions of our community’s ongoing status: Indicators related to public health, education, economic conditions, safety issues, demographic issues, and many more. We need to create methods to continuously monitor the important indicators, understanding these in terms of the week-to-week or month-to-month variation in these key data. It is the variation in the data that will help us understand our communities. When we don’t understand variation: • We will miss trends where there are trends. • We will see trends where there are no trends. • We will not be able to understand past performance or predict future performance. • People will be given credit or blame when they are either lucky or unlucky. This is because we tend to attribute everything to human effort, heroics, frailty, error or deliberate sabotage, no matter what the systemic cause. 3. Understanding psychology and human behavior We tend to have simplistic and often wrong theories about why people behave the way they do. We tend to look for heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, those who are motivated and those who need to be motivated. To understand our communities, we need a deeper understanding of personal, group, neighborhood, and community psychology. When we don’t understand psychology: • We won’t understand motivation or why people do what they do. • We will resort to carrots and sticks and other forms of induced motivation that have no positive effect and impair the relationship between the motivator and the one to be motivated. • We won’t understand the process of change and resistance to change. • We will revert to coercive and paternalistic approaches to our people. • We will create cynicism, demoralization, demotivation, guilt, resentment, burn-out, craziness, and turnover. 4. Understanding a theory of knowledge Knowledge, learning and improvement are necessary for us as individuals as well as our communities. What is knowledge? How is it increased? What is improvement? How is it accomplished? Just as we tend to have simplistic notions of people and human behavior, we have simplistic notions about what is necessary to improve conditions, solve problems and master the task of leading a community to a better life. When we don’t understand the theory of knowledge: • We don’t know how to plan and accomplish learning and improvement. • We won’t understand the difference between improvement and change. • Problems will remain unsolved, despite our best efforts. PROFOUND KNOWLEDGE AND OUR PREMISES ABOUT PEOPLE Without the system of profound knowledge, we will accept, unquestioned, certain premises about people and problems. Some examples of commonly held—and dysfunctional—premises: • People are basically unwilling to make an effort, to be honest and to do the right thing. • People can and should be controlled and motivated through fear and rewards. • When things go wrong, it’s because someone messed up. • People don’t improve and learn new things because they are unwilling to improve and learn new things. People resist change. • Communities consist of individuals; improving communities, therefore, consists of improving individuals in the community. • To accomplish consistent excellence in a community requires the heroic efforts of outstanding individuals. These premises are false and represent a lack of profound knowledge. A starting point for viewing a community as a system, therefore, is for the leaders of the community to adopt a new set of premises, to think differently and to begin to understand the system of profound knowledge. Second: Break down barriers Another starting point is to "break down barriers." Communities are filled with "functional ramparts." They might be pictured as in Figure 2. Figure 2. Functional ramparts in a community: The conventional view of a community. Of course there are many more ramparts in a community: churches, the media, United Way, the judicial system, legislators, and regulators, etc. Also within each of these ramparts are more internal ramparts. Each competes with the others for funds, for credit for successes, for attention, and for philosophical superiority. A rampart-mentality consists of a collusion among the various fiefdoms to not interfere in each other's territory, to maintain autonomy and rugged independence. This, of course, is the great American way, right? Wrong. We are great as a nation and as cities only when we work together and we have barely scratched the surface of our capacity for collaboration. True collaboration requires a systems view. A community that does not have continuous inter-agency cooperation and public-private partnerships is in deep trouble. The likelihood is that it will never make progress on its major problems and needs. This point must be emphasized, however: When we talk about a community as a system, we are describing a quantum leap beyond such cooperation and partnerships. To be sure, such collaborative relationships between the different agencies and sectors are essential. They are probably necessary prerequisites for creating systems in the community. But cooperation is not enough. We must understand systems, think in terms of systems, create systems, lead systems, and work together in systems. What is a systems view? Below is a picture of it. Contrast this with the rampart view in Figure 2. A system consists of common planning, common priorities and integrated networks of services addressing common needs, sharing common vision and values. This cannot happen without a common understanding of the deep, systemic causes of the community’s problems. Figure 3. A systems view of a community. CONCLUSION Working with a systems view, a community together works at identifying. 1. The purpose of the community. 2. The highest priority needs of the community. 3. Indicators of how well these needs are met. 4. The systems of interacting conditions and factors which create the needs, problems and gaps. 5. The causes of the problems. 6. The interdependent policies, activities, interventions, programs, and resources that are necessary and sufficient to meet the needs and solve the problems at their source. 7. The plans for implementing these solutions and monitoring these solutions. 8. The cross-functional organizational infrastructure needed to support and sustain these solutions. Communities that begin approaching their needs in a systemic way, gradually building their capacity to do so, will find an abundance of untapped energy and resources. I suspect that when a community takes a systems approach to its needs, it won’t much matter where it starts. Because it’s all a system, starting in any part of the community will lead to the whole community. REFERENCE LIST • Bemowski, Karen. 1992. Can Quality Help the Troubled Russian Economy? Quality Progress, Vol. 25, Number 3 (March). This is based on Ms. Bemowski’s interview of me. • Daly, Herman E. & John B. Cobb, Jr. 1994. For the Common Good (2nd edition). Boston: Beacon Press. I found this to be an awesome treatment of a community from an economics perspective (or economics from a community perspective). It doesn’t explore "communities as systems" as much as the interaction among the macro-systems that shape communities and the people who live in them: systems related to economics, society, religion, and the environment. • Deming, W. Edwards. 1994. The New Economics (2nd edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. • Deming, W. Edwards. 1982. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. • Kilian, Cecilia. 1992. The World of W. Edwards Deming (2nd edition). Knoxville, TN: SPC Press. • Langford, David P. & Barbara R. Cleary. 1995. Orchestrating Learning with Quality. Milwaukee: ASQC Quality Press. Langford and Cleary have many insights into systemic approaches to learning. • Schwinn, Carole & David. 1994. On the Quality Community Quest, We Are Not Alone. Journal for Quality and Participation, Vol. 17, Number 5 (September). This is one of the very few articles that explicitly discusses communities as systems. • Senge, Peter. et.al. 1994. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. New York: Doubleday. • Weisbord, Marvin R. et.al. 1992. Discovering Common Ground. San Francisco: Berret Koehler Publishers Inc. Weisbord (and authors of other chapters included in the book) describe "Future Search Conferences," useful in helping a community to think collaboratively (which is not quite the same as thinking systemically). Specifically, Chapter 3, by Eva Schindler Rainman and Ronald Lypitt, discusses "Building Collaborative Communities."
Tacoma/Pierce County Partnership Project Archives
