discussion systems
Organizations and Systems Program Transcript NARRATOR:
As a leader in education, having knowledge of both systems theory and change theory will be key in affecting change in your organization. Dr. Nancy Blair explains these theories and analyzes the structure, politics, and culture of organizations.
DR. NANCY BLAIR: It's important for anybody who is interested in leadership to understand, first, organizations and what makes tick. Typically, when people go into leadership studies, they think of wherever they've been, their context. And usually, their context is a smaller context, an office or a classroom. And if you think about leadership in an organization, you have to telescope out from that and begin to think about the organization as a whole.
There's been a long history of thinking about organizational development. Then in the last 15 to 20 years, we've had some good thinkers out there that have helped us understand how organizations are really a system. And therefore, we have to understand what a system is. Systems theory is relatively a new concept on the horizon as we think about organizations. So people like Edward Demming, Peter Senge, and most recently Margaret Wheatley, have helped us understand how systems work. And the best way I can explain it to you is to give you an analogy.
If you think about a mobile over a baby's crib, and you think about all the pieces that hang down from that mobile to entertain the baby, if you were to come up and touch one piece of it, what would happen to the mobile? Well, what happens is that the whole thing starts to move and shift.
And that's the way it is in a system. Whether it's a school that is a system, or a school that is part of the district that is a larger system, when you affect one piece of it, it's not just that one piece. That one piece is interconnected to all of the other pieces. So obviously, if you're going to be a leader acting on that system, you need to understand how your one act doesn't just affect that one thing. It could affect everything within the system. Luckily, because of our better understanding of how systems work, we have a better understanding of how to affect change in an organization. We have a body of knowledge called change theory that actually goes back to the early works of Kurt Lewin in the '50s. But most recently, we have people like Michael Fullan, who are translating information about the change process into good knowledge base that we can use as we plan change in our organization.
So for example, if you're going to initiate a change, you know that there are things you need to do at the beginning of the change that are practical and pragmatic to get the organization ready to change. You also know then, as you ©2015 Laureate Education, Inc. try to implement the change, that there are certain things you need to do to get the change underway. And most importantly, there are things you need to do as the change moves on into institutionalization so that the change lasts. It's really the implementation of good change theory and research on change that allows us to take a great idea into action and into something that really has a long lasting impact in the organization.
So if we have a good systems theory and understanding of how systems work, and good change theory and understanding of how change occurs in an organization, and those theories are based on research in the field around what works, then those theories really should guide our practice. And that's the benefit of having them. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to understand what's going on in an organization. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to make change. You have a theory that will guide your practice. And it's important.
Lee Bolman and Terry Deal wrote a book several years ago called Reframing Organizations. And what they helped us do was take all of this stuff in organizations and think about how to categorize it. They came up with four pieces.
The first is the structural piece of organizations. And that's where you tend to think about something called bureaucracy. Organizations are structured uniquely. You might have a school that is structured very hierarchically with a large urban district, a large management system, that then puts decisions down at the school level, and then down at the classroom level.
Understanding the structure of an organization is critical if you're going to move that organization forward because it's that structure that helps us understand how this place works, how the pieces work and fit together. But the structure alone is not enough. You have to have other perspectives as well.
So the second one they talk about is the human resource piece. And that's the perspective of all the people in the organization. An organization isn't just departments and divisions and layers. It's the people that work within those departments and divisions and layers. And this is where we get into that balance of is the organization structured just to meet the needs of the organization or is the organization also structured to meet the needs of the human beings within it? So the human resource frame says we also better pay attention to the people. And we better pay attention to the value they have in this organization that they can contribute to it. So that's the second piece of the puzzle.
That, again, is not enough. There's a third piece, the political piece. This is an interesting one. Often, people new in leadership don't like politics. But if you aren't a good politician in a school district, you're not going to get what you need for your organization. Politics is all about how we divide up scarce resources. It's how I get the piece of the pie that I need to run my school. How I get the piece of the budget to run my department, for example. So you not only have to know the structure and understand the people, but you have to understand the political climate, so that you can get your hands on the resources to help you accomplish the goals of the organization.
And then, the last piece they talk about is not quite as concrete. It's called the organizational culture. And culture is best described as the way we do things around here. Every organization is unique. And as you move into an organization it didn't just exist in that moment of time when you moved in. It came from a long, rich history.
And one of the mistakes leaders often make is that they don't find out about that history. They don't honor that history. And they don't respect that history as they try to move ahead.
I always tell people that when they go into a leadership of an organization, the thing they need to do is spend time living in it for a while, talking to people, listening to people. So in order to move ahead, you have to first look back. You have to understand the context of that the organization resides in. You have to understand the culture and where it came from. And you can only do that by talking with people and really listening to where this organization has been before you can begin to attempt to understand where this organization needs to go. Organizational culture is probably the piece that is the hardest to discover, but may be the most important to understand if you're going to move an organization forward.
So it's important to understand systems, that an organization is an interconnected system, and that what leaders often want to do is affect change in the system. But in order to do that, you really have to understand the puzzle that is the organization.
And that puzzle, then, is made up of the four pieces that we've talked about. The structural piece, how is it organized structurally? The human resource piece, which is who are the people in this organization? The political piece, which is how do we get the resources to do the job we want this organization to do? And then, the cultural piece, which is the whole undercurrent of how we operate in this organization. And a leader has to understand all four of those pieces, both from a historical perspective and in the current context before you can move your leadership forward into the future.
So far, we've talked about what's happening within the organization, but of course, no organization operates in a vacuum. You are operating in the larger context. You can't ignore what's going on at the national level, at the international level that's impacting education. It impacts the funding. It impacts the public's understanding and the public's desire.
©2015 Laureate Education, Inc. "No Child Left Behind" is this huge external context and pressure point for schools that's going to impact the way schools organize, the demands they make on the people within schools, the political resources that they gather. So there's always this interplay between what's happening in this particular system and then the larger system that it lives in, which is the societal influences, the political influences on a much larger scale.
When we think about creating change in an organization, it often makes people uneasy. Roland Barth once said that the only people that like change are babies and then only when necessary. So people tend to resist change because it's conflictive for them. It means I have to move from where I am to someplace different. And that's uncomfortable.
But conflict in an organization is absolutely necessary to move the organization forward. If there was no conflict, there would be no change. And actually, that's even a myth because there is no staying the way we are because the world around us is changing. And as we relate it to the four pieces that we talked about, any time you want to change a structure, or someone's job description, or how we gather resources, or we have to cut resources-- which is all too often the case-- it creates tension and conflict. So the leader's role is how do you productively take the point of conflict and turn it into an opportunity to see the value of where we're going and how being there is going to be better overall for the goal of the organization than where we are now?
This can all sound overwhelming. There's so much to think about leading within an organization. So what I often advise people to do is to start small and to go back into their organization with a new set of eyes and to begin to look at things.
For example, how are things interconnected? Look at a decision that the principal makes. Look at a decision that a department head makes. And begin to trace how that decision connects to someone way over there that you hadn't even anticipated that it would, or how it affects you in the role that you play to try to understand all those connections. To understand how the structure might shift, how it might impact on an individual person in their role, how it might impact on the resources that we get the next time we go up through the budget process. It's really an awareness, an awakening, to the complexity of an organization. And it's only by opening your eyes and having that awareness that bit by bit by bit you'll start to get that aha moment. And you'll see, oh, I now start to get how all these pieces begin to fit together. And it's not until you've had that aha moment that you can really be an effective leader in an organization and telescope out and look at the whole, not just all of the parts.
So once you've had that greater awareness and that moment of aha, I see how things fit together, it's going to help you know where to start. It's going to help you know where does my leadership begin to interconnect with this organization? Knowing the history, knowing the complexity, where's a good entry point for me to begin to make the kind of change and have the kind of impact that I want in the organization? You'll be able to start proactivel