Adaptive Leadership and Cultures

20 open-source guides for learning about Systems Innovation

This paper seeks to outline the current dominant approach to the
performance management of social interventions: Outcome-Based Performance Management (OBPM). It then explores the meaning of complexity approaches, and attempts to articulate what is meant by a complex system. It then explores the way in which thinking of social interventions as existing within complex systems challenges OBPM. Finally, it identifies potential elements of a complexity-friendly approach to the PM of social interventions.

An exploration of systems - entities that maintain their existence
through the mutual interaction of their parts. This definition of a system implies something beyond cause and effect. A systems view is somewhat in contradiction to the concept of analysis, which is breaking things down into smaller pieces to simplify the study. Analysis brings with it the risk of potentially losing the most relevant characteristics of the system, and possibly developing a less than complete understanding. 

'A key question inherent in any systems innovation initiative is how to scale to a level where we are affecting the whole system. Our world is populated with many small initiatives but as yet we have not realized meaningful large-scale systems change in many areas where it is most needed. The question of how we go from a system-changing idea to the re-organizing of a whole system is still unanswered. This guide is designed to help you think about scaling system changing ideas through a nonlinear approach that leverages the power of connectivity, feedback loops, and network effects to work with complexity; to scale faster and farther while remaining agile'.

Organisational evolution and the shift from the analogy of the organisation as machine through ecosystems to living systems. 'Living systems not only respond to their environment, they create and recreate themselves to fit their environment'.

Letting go of control to unleash the untapped energy of our organisations...

'When you think of your organization as a living system, the system is dynamic and already filled with energy. It doesn’t need an outside power source to get it moving, it is already in motion. Therefore, when we focus on controlling an organization that is a living system, it interferes with the energy that is naturally flowing through and within the system'.