Technology and Organizations

I’ve been talking about systems savvy, but the rubber needs to hit the road. How do you measure it? To help people develop systems savvy you need to know how to assess their starting and progressing competency. If we can’t measure it, we can’t effectively develop training, hire people who have it, or track its organizational impacts.

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Systems Savvy is the “ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how that technology might be meshed with organizational practice. People with systems savvy understand that technologies and practices are intertwined — and they know how to make adjustments to both the technology and the practice to effectively weave them together.”

Systems savvy is a bit more than systems thinking (For example, Senge’s The 5th Discipline). Systems thinking is ability to see the whole and thereby use the leverage of small changes to make improvements. Systems savvy includes understanding how to intertwine the technology, organizational, and people components for better performance — not just focusing on one small change, but rather more on overall design.

Complicated ideas. Complicated measurement. But we do have some foundations to build on. M. Frank has developed measures of capacity for engineering systems thinking. The topics measured include:

• Desire to work with systems and to ‘love’ working on the systems level
• Understanding the synergy of the system
• Understanding the system from multiple perspectives
• Not getting stuck on details
• Interdisciplinary knowledge
• Learn or analyze the customer’s or market’s needs
• Perform engineering & economic optimization

Other measurement for systems thinking focuses more on the dynamics. Sweeney & Sterman present simple problems such as graphing the contents of a bathtub over time given how much is flowing in and flowing out. This gets at whether people understand system concepts like feedback, delays, and stocks and flows.

Measures of intelligence also can provide background for measuring systems savvy. In a 2006 paper, Hedlund, Sternberg (an expert on measuring tricky things like tacit knowledge), and their colleagues describe their creation of measures of “practical intelligence.” They note that:”.. individuals who effectively solve practical problems are able to recognize that a problem exists, to define the problem clearly, to allocate appropriate resources to the problem, to formulate strategies for solving the problem, to monitor their solutions, and to evaluate the outcomes of those solutions. Furthermore, in order to understand the problem in the first place, individuals need to be able to filter relevant information from irrelevant information, relate new information to existing knowledge, and compile information into a meaningful picture. The effective use of these skills to solve practical, everyday problems can be viewed as an indicator of one’s practical intelligence. ”

Their measures of problem solving skills were based on the solutions provided to a variety of business scenarios (though they were designed to be answered without business background) and then the open-ended solutions were rated by business school alumni and current students on: (a) time requirements, (b) realism, (c) accuracy and sufficiency of information, (d) prerequisite knowledge or experience, and (e) types of skills/abilities addressed.

Measuring systems savvy would include a similar set of steps (following Sternberg et al.): Approach organizational leaders with the request to identify people with clear systems savvy (using the definition given above). Ask the identified “savvy” people to describe a situation that required them to use systems savvy. Have them describe what they did and why it involved systems savvy. Have them describe what a novice or person without system savvy might have done instead.

This first portion provides the basic scenarios and some better and worse responses to the scenario. The next step is to have other experts help you create additional possible responses to the situation. The experts are asked to create responses that indicate high and low levels of systems savvy. Each of the responses is then weighted (again using experts) to create the score for choosing the particular response. In the case of systems savvy, we will need to be sure that the responses include the possibility of only focusing on technical or organizational solutions (lower scores), as well as responses that intertwine technical and organizational possibilities in sophisticated ways (higher scores). The scenarios themselves should focus on initial analysis tasks (how to get a clear picture of the organizational and technical context), problem solutions, and evaluation of results.

The validity of the measurement tool is initially tested by approaching still more experts — and now also novices — and having them select (via multiple choice) responses to the scenarios. The results should find the identified savvy experts scoring significantly higher than the novices. If so, your measurement tool is ready for the open road.

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IdeasProject has a great interview with Tim Brown focused on our shifting roles as users, participants, and consumers. He notes that communication technology enables increased participation in how we interact with service providers and takes us back to an earlier age when people were more active participants in their society.

He goes on to speak of all of our need for design thinking (video version below):

I do believe this idea of participation changes design fundamentally and has to change design fundamentally. On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate. That’s one place you can put it. You can say, ‘Okay, we need to start teaching design thinking to everybody.’

In this world, I don’t think design ever gets finished. Things continue to evolve and morph and change. We have to get used to this idea that design becomes more of an enabling thing that goes on over a long period, rather than something that gets done, finished, and handed over.

Design thinking, paraphrasing from a 2008 post to Tim’s blog, is matching our needs with what is technologically feasible, perhaps with a focus on business strategy, customer value, and market opportunity. There, I think he was offering a formal designer’s perspective — designing for a market. Now he may be broadening the ideas to consider both formal designers and consumers of design — with the idea that design is never finished and is enacted by users/stakeholders.

There is a great deal of traction around these ideas. I’ve contributed All of Us as Accidental Systems Designers, and Systems Savvy: Do You Have It? (as well as prior comments on IDEO and design thinking). Seth Godin talks about change being the results of tribal action, not the action of a “king.” Many people now even do their sensemaking in public: Consider the number of blog entries around the value and forms of use for Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

I focus on organizational issues as systems savvy (my term for the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how technology and organizational practice might be interwoven in new ways) has a great deal of leverage there. Systems savvy is critical to modern organizational function given the complexity and reach of organizational systems. I also think there is special opportunity in organizations. In organizations we are are more likely to formally think about practice than, I suspect, in our individual lives.

Our organizations have increasingly sophisticated work systems built up from meshed organizational practices and technology tools. These systems are constantly in flux due to the needs of innovation and the pressures of economics. We can either let these systems evolve, or we can practice design — all of us can practice design, not just change agents. Stakeholders are no longer mere recipients of work system change except as recipients of vision. Instead, stakeholders are active participants though their own sensemaking (the understanding they have of the work system and the possible options for the work system’s use) and active participation in the design of the system. Thus our need for systems savvy, design thinking, and more proactive participation in our how we get work done.

Tim Brown describes these roles and needs as they relate to the power of communication technologies. I’ll push it a bit further and claim that our reliance on software systems, rather than physical ones, gives us greater opportunity to participate in design and change throughout the organization. Henry Ford’s workers were unlikely to be able to re-engineer their assembly-lines. Many of us, however, can easily participate in the design of our workflows.

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Systems Savvy is the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how that technology might be meshed with organizational practice.  People with systems savvy understand that technologies and practices are intertwined — and they know how to make adjustments to both the technology and the practice to effectively weave them together.

Who has systems savvy? I suspect all the readers of this blog have some degree of systems savvy.  However, there are folks whose efforts and thinking make them excellent models for all of us:

• Brian Humphrey, LA Fire Department
• MIT Professor Pattie Mae and Ph.D. Candidate Pranav Mistry
• Tony Hsieh, Zappos
• John Seely Brown, past Chief Scientist at Xerox and past Director of the Palo Alto Research Center

My examples in this blog tend to focus on information technology, but systems savvy also applies to industrial and other technologies.  For example the first person who thought about how farm chemicals might be more safely, cheaply, and effectively applied by “plug-and play” direct connectors (versus farmers having to fill, mix, and refill their spreaders by hand) also had systems savvy.  Technology possibilities provided opportunities for better, safer, practice — but these had to be realized and implemented by people with systems savvy.

Deep technical or organizational expertise is not required for systems savvy.  It’s an appreciation of the possible… which might even be limited by deep expertise if people instead anchor on present uses.

A degree of systems savvy is critical to both technical and organizational designers.  Systems designers (the people that design the technologies we use) with systems savvy can design the technology with “triggers” to help others better understand the possible uses of their technology.  For example, IDEO and Kaiser Permanente co-designed an information board that helps new parents and nurses keep track of the “journey home” following the birth of the baby.  The technology had clearly “flippable” cards (designating whether the step was completed or not), a whiteboard surface and pen, and clearly marked areas for adding information.  The design makes clear that cards can be reordered, should be flipped as steps occur, and provides a clear dashboard of the process.

Your Journey Home Board

Organizational designers with systems savvy can imagine how not-yet invented technologies might help their organizations effectiveness and efficiency, and ask for such technologies to be designed. Hilton Hotels issued a Request for Proposals last year asking for “game” tools to help them show employees how different actions can affect a guest’s mood.  Hilton’s training exec David Kervella saw the value in a particular technology form, but had to get technical experts to help him realize the vision.

My ideas on systems savvy are a work in progress and I would appreciate your comments.  Some earlier stages in this evolution include:

• Systems conductivity (here & here)
• Accidental systems designers
• Mental models of systems

I hope to spend some of my summer interviewing people who have demonstrated systems savvy.  Beside those I note above, who else do you think has systems savvy?  Personal introductions appreciated.

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