How strongly is your organisation networked within its own ecosystem? Do the mutually supporting subsystems join your musical band in unison to create the rhythm you are looking for? Not quite an easy answer if you’re talking about today’s big and complex corporations which are large dynamic organisations with high levels of interconnectedness across multiple value chains. As they operate over diverse locations, procuring raw materials, assembling the finished products, undertaking human resource management and marketing their products, an ecosystem comprising of multiple components develops.
The interdependence across these multiple components and their roles in the smooth functioning of an organisation are very well summarised by this little folktale from grandma’s tales where one comes across the puzzled gardenerexploring the causes of why the flower plants are not blooming in his garden even after his sincere toil and labour. The plants point the finger at the stray cow which was eating its young shoots. The cow is in no mood to take the blame and passes the buck to the shepherd’s reluctance to feed her. How can you expect me to do my duty when I remain hungry as the cook fails to provide me food, says the shepherd. Poor cook ! Who will understand his predicament when the woodcutter shirks his responsibility to supply wood for the fire under the oven. But the woodcutter expresses his helplessness. After all, he needs the axe to cut wood , which the blacksmith is unable to provide. How can I make the axe from raw iron on the anvil when the rain douses off the fire on the pit, cries the blacksmith. But why does it rain? Riding on the traditional belief that it rains when the frog croaks the final fault falls on the poor innocuous frog! The frog gives his defence that he is not to be blamed at all as he is duty bound to follow his age old custom of croaking and it is his hereditary right!
Thus, the chain of blame-game for the flowers not blooming ends with the frog bound by his customary habits that he can’t breakaway from. The multitude of bottlenecks in the supply-networks of inputs needs to be properly addressed by the gardener if he wants his garden to be in full bloom.
The gardener leader in an organisation cannot afford to miss the trees in search for the forest. In the corporate world, identification of the remotest factor causing the disruption in the optimal functioning of the organisation is essential to initiating an appropriate intervention. Every such subsystem might have some independent or interlinked disruptors that need to be adequately attended to. Very often, the corporate management overlooks certain problems or factors which appear to be trivial on the surface, but in effect these may have far reaching impact resulting in erroneous strategic decisions.
In order to avoid falling into this trap of overlooking seemingly trivial subsystems, the corporate leadership needs to invest in systems thinking. This is can be done when the associated linkages of the constituent parts is well understood, and managers assigned to specific tasks avoid the silo behaviour of sticking to their own assigned tasks without having any knowledge of what people assigned to other tasks are doing. Thus, there is a need for cross functional teams in an organization so that members better understand each other.
Through out the entire tale of the gardener the nature of bottlenecks was pointing at a whole lot of physically identifiable short comings like lack of food, fire wood, axe etc. but at the end one could come across the intangible factor in terms of impactful customary beliefs and habits. Quite often, these either remain unseen or not given enough attention. Yet they are significant in intangibly influencing the output and productivity of the performers in the organisation, such as the croaking of the frog in the tale.
Organisations and management programmes need to nurture such leadership. HR managers need to facilitate greater communication across different verticals, and the top management needs to have a holistic understanding of all constituent parts of the organisation. Only when these conditions are met can we expect a really competitive and dynamic corporation establishing itself as a dominant player in the market.
This article appeared in The Economic Times’ ET Government Opinion Column on 23rd December 2019. Written in collaboration with Kuladhar Saikia. Link: https://government.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/governance/opinion-the-gardener-leader-for-systems-thinking/72938326
Aranyak Saikia 