Organizations as Living Systems

We often make the mistake of thinking about companies/corporate entities as if they are machines with parts that we can replace when they aren’t working the way we want them to. Organizations are made up of humans and are more like the human body than like machines. All the people, departments, and programs must work together for it to survive. It is more effective to see organizations as living things that can learn and grow and that can heal from injury or sickness, because organizations can experience trauma just like individual people can. To do this, we need to apply systems thinking, which simply means understanding that everyone is connected to each other in a system. For the system to do its work effectively, everyone needs to be on the same page about basic mission and values, even while each person is doing something different. Systems thinking encourages us to look at events and patterns by focusing on the connection and relationship between the system’s parts instead of only looking at the individual parts in isolation. To do this, we need to recognize system problems rather than applying the machine mentality to problem solving.