Charles Chandler 0:12 Welcome, welcome to The Age of Organizational Effectiveness. This is the podcast that explores stories about organizations and their performance, not just for themselves, but for the common good. I'm your host, Charles Chandler. Today we're at Episode # 122, which is called Adaptive Action. In this episode, I'm joined by Glenda Eoyang, who along with her co author Royce Holladay, wrote the book, "Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization." Glenda is the founding director of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute. We discuss her book and her approach to organizational uncertainty. And I'm now joined by Glenda Eoyang, who is the author of "Adaptive Action." Good morning, Glenda, actually, afternoon now, I guess. Glenda Eoyang Yes. Good afternoon. Charles Chandler We talked for a minute (before the show), I think you were you were in a meeting earlier today about health systems. Glenda Eoyang 1:16 Yes, these days are facing complexity in lots of spaces. and public health is certainly one of them. Charles Chandler 1:24 Well, tell us how you got interested in this complexity area. First, how did you become interested in human systems and their dynamics? Glenda Eoyang 1:36 I've been interested in human systems as long as I remember, but I began to look at the complexity of them in the late 1980s. I was an entrepreneur, I was running a technical training and documentation company. And within six months, everything shifted. And suddenly, everything that worked before stopped working...and I didn't know what would work in the future. And so I was at a major point of transformation, as the industry was, and my organization was... and so, I took a holiday and picked up what I thought was going to be a really easy summer read. And that was "Chaos, Making a new science," by James Glick. And I thought, great! It has nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with business, nothing to do with leadership, it'll be a great escape. But I read the first chapter. And it told me something about my leadership and what I should do to get my company back on track. And then I read the second one, and it told me something about managing a particular client relationship. And I read another one, and it told me how to work with a troublesome employee, and by the time I finished the book, I realized that there was a leadership practice embedded in the work that he was talking about. And so that started my journey of learning about complexity, and chaos, as that science has emerged, practicing it in my own applications and my own leadership, and then sharing it with others. So I've been around this world for a long time. Charles Chandler 3:14 Yeah, that's great. Well, you know, this podcast is about organizational effectiveness. And we've talked about complex adaptive systems on one or two episodes in the past. And you know, there's a lot of pattern behaviors in complex human systems. Like a flock of birds and a school of fish, they obey simple rules and create patterns. Tell us a little bit about human systems and how they might differ in those respects? Do they also obey simple patterns? Glenda Eoyang 3:48 There variety of opinions about that? We think, yes, they do. And the connection is establishing system wide patterns. So when you walk into an organization, or when you look at organizational effectiveness, you're looking at patterns, patterns of performance, of quality, of turnaround time, of client satisfaction of employee engagement, all of those are patterns that exist in the organizations that you're trying to establish. And what we believe is that those patterns emerge, because everyone in the system is following, either explicitly or implicitly, a short list of simple rules, minimum specifications, and each of those rules has lots of freedom in it for each person to interpret. But because they're all using basically the same rules, it sets conditions for the system wide patterns to emerge. Charles Chandler 4:48 Now, where do those rules come from? Is it sort of embedded in our culture? Is it a norm that we all agree to in sort of unusual ways, or where would you say those patterns are coming from? Glenda Eoyang 5:02 Like all emergent systems, we believe that conditions are set, so that the patterns and the rules emerge. So those rules can come from many different places. Sometimes it's a leader who sets conditions for everyone in the organization to follow the same rules. Sometimes, it is a discipline, like in an engineering organization. Engineers come with a certain set of practical rules that they follow. Sometimes it's a moral stance, sometimes it's a community. Sometimes it's simply the kind of work that people do as they work together. And so they come from a variety of places. Sometimes they're not even conscious, sometimes they're very conscious. So I can give you an example of one of our rules. And this was an intentional one. But it is a search for what's true and useful. Search for what's true and useful. And we went in that direction, because there are lots of people who look at complexity in organizational systems, who find what's true about talking about the system, but they don't know what to do about it. And then there are others who intuitively work well in complexity, all the great leaders you've ever known whether they were aware or not, they were setting conditions for organizational effectiveness. But what we wanted to do in HSD, was to bring the two together, the truth of the scientific background and grounding in the science, as well as the usefulness of practical application. And so we have a community of about 900 people around the world, for whom that is one of their principles of behavior. And so there is a pattern that emerges from all of us. Charles Chandler 6:53 Yeah, so let's see if we can come up with kind of an everyday sense of what what human dynamics is all about. When you talk about systems and complex adaptive systems, we're talking about agents in a sense that are are free to do things on their own, like, like humans, humans in organizations make up a system in a way. There's a social system, there's, there's all kinds of interactions going on, certainly. And some of them are embedded within units within the organization, there's a container of sorts, that surrounds them, and they interact with other units. So I know that in your analysis of organizations, you make a distinction between, you know, 'containers,' and 'differences' and, and 'exchanges' between these sorts of things. So give us a little bit more of a thumbnail sketch of... of how these factors, these elements come into play. Glenda Eoyang 7:58 We'll start by saying, usually, when we talk about change in organizational structures, we think about org charts, we think about plans that go from A to B to C to D in a linear way, we think about power, we think about straight line planning and strategy. That that's a mental model about how change happens in an organization. And it's great when it works. But what I have run into in the 80s. And what lots of people are running into today is that that mental model of mechanism and command and control is no longer sufficient for the speed and the complexity of change we're having. And so what happens is that people who have the old mindset, but living in the new world, they get stuck, and they don't know what to do. Or they keep doing the same thing over and over, even if it doesn't work. And so what I was looking for in complexity for my own practice, and for what I teach others, was how to get unstuck. If I'm doing what I think is right, and the world is not collaborating, cooperating with me, and I'm stuck, what are my options for action? And so from the complexity science, we found three options for action. One was to shift the boundary, the container. We could make it smaller and speed things up, or we can make it larger and slow things down. That was one option for something to do when you're stuck, because the world is uncertain, and it's not following the rules you think it should. So that's one thing. The second is what you're focusing on. Are you focusing on a lot of things at the same time and open for possibility? Or are you zooming in with your dashboard on a very few different instance that make a difference. So that's another thing you could do to turn the system. If you can't predict it, that those are the differences. And then the third of the exchanges, you can hook together, what's unhooked or unhook things that are hooked together to build the connections for the system. And that we believe that those are the levers that you have in a complex system, to shift the patterns, even when you can't predict or control. It's about getting stuck, and then getting unstuck. And these are the ways you do it. Charles Chandler 10:37 Um, you know, you've brought up command and control as being a paradigm that's, you know, quite prevalent. Also, efficiency kind of goes along with that. There was an example, you know, a couple of years ago in Flint, Michigan, where the city decided to switch the water supply to a less expensive and more efficient (they thought) source. But as that took place, a new... a new source of water was introduced to the system, which had led pipes, and if that new source was not treated as well as the old source, and so some of the lead leached out. So efficiency, although is a, an objective, and some of our systems, you know, the complexity of the system comes in to bite us at some point. So, reflect a little bit on that example, if you would, Glenda Eoyang 11:39 Hmm. They're called unintentional consequences. So if you think you understand enough about the system, and you think you can predict what it's going to do, then you take an action, and the system takes a left turn. That's called an unintentional consequence. And what we do, and ultimately, this is what happened in Flint, is that there's a cycle of seeing the effects of a decision, thinking about what that means, and then taking a different action. We call it adaptive action. What happened? So what does it mean? Now? What do we do? And that cycle was just influent. Too slow. And to difficult, if they had realized if they had been testing the water, for they made that decision to become more efficient, they would have realized the what that the lead levels were increasing long before they would affect children. This so what would have been a recognition of public health issues and questions, health equity issues, and they would have done something different, but because they were so certain, so arrogant, so unquestioning, they didn't even see the unintended consequences until it was way down the line, and causing a great deal of difficulty. And so part of the efficiency, the effectiveness in a complex system, is that you're constantly collecting data, and processing it and understanding it, shifting action as you need to. And that kind of agility is what is one of the capacities that's so necessary, not just to build an effective organization, but to maintain it over time. So what am I going to do? What are the consequences? What are my options, then? What can I do? And that that cycle is the only way to reduce risk and control risk in a complex and predictable system? Charles Chandler 13:50 Yeah. One of the pioneers of the early part of the 20th century was Frederick Winslow Taylor, who talked about gaining efficiency on the shop floor, mostly introducing high speed steel, more efficient machines, etc.. And this is a closed environment, because you know, you've got the wall around the shop floor. It's all, you know, bricked in, and so the weather can't get there. It's a controlled environment. This is the kind of environment that efficiency is possible. But when you get into an open environment, like the case in Flint, or in many other cases, you know, it's a totally different situation. Do you look at closed and open systems in fundamentally different ways? Glenda Eoyang 14:40 We believe that they're on a continuum. So there's some complexity people who reject the whole idea of a closed system. were much too practical to do that. What we say is that the closed state, the stable state, the predictable state, is just a state of the conditions And that they can be shifted larger containers, more differences, looser connections, that can shift a very stable system into one that's less stable, and all the way out to one that is chaotic. And so for us, the job of the leader, the job of an effective organization, is to shift back and forth along that continuum, to meet the needs of the conditions of the of the customers in the environment, of supply chains. And so it's a kind of dance for the organization to harmonize and get in sync with whatever their resources and products are. And sometimes that means getting very structured, or parts of the organization being very structured and predictable. And other parts being very open and flexible. In one of the companies that we're working with now, particularly in China, they have a great deal of conflict at this moment between logistics and manufacturing, which is incredibly efficient. And the research and development arm, which is exploratory testing things, really sometimes more in a chaotic realm. And so both of those functions are essential to the organization. And yet, they haven't found a way we're helping them find a way for them to recognize the complementary nature of those two patterns. And then a real complex system needs both closed, predictable and open and flexible. The question is not either or, we say it's which, to what extent, and when? Charles Chandler 16:44 Yeah. Well, even a closed system has to open its doors now and then and bring in inputs, and it has to push out some outputs. And in the old days, you know, companies used to assume that, you know, the goods would arrive on the loading dock. And then engineers would decide what to do with them, how best to organize the process. And then from the, you know, the other loading dock that we're taking the outputs, those just magically disappeared, you know, and everything was great. But as you say, it's not quite as simple as you might think. So tell us a little bit more about about human systems. And if you can give us an example, and how you've approached it using your methods Glenda Eoyang 17:36 I have one example briefly, because it speaks right back to the manufacturing, closed system environment. So one of our clients is a German retailer. And they are working with their supply chains to try to be sustainable in terms of the human systems, and the environmental systems that generate the products that are sold through their retail chain. And on the one hand, you could think of those manufacturing sites across Southeast Asia, each one as a closed system. They get orders, they do production, they send out satisfying orders that you could think of it that way. And yet, that particular retailer wants to think about that more as an open system in which the human beings who are working there, bring themselves to their work, and take their ...more than just money home with them. And so how can that system, which is on the one hand a clothes manufacturing system... how can it also feed into the open, adaptive system of the employees and the staff and the communities that support them. And so they're working on ways to facilitate that process. So that's one of the ways that we're working with facilitators who both accommodate what man... managers and owners need, and find ways in those closed systems also to accommodate human needs and equity and safety. Another example is in healthcare. So as you know, the idea of the manufacturing world, you can imagine it's more closed than you can a health care delivery world or any kind of service. It's just by nature, more open than a manufacturing one. So we've been doing work with several health care institutions and also with public health, especially since the COVID Challenge began. And so in work that we're doing with the large health system in the UK, there were several things that they wanted to do with their human systems. So one was, they had experienced COVID as a very productive, satisfying time course it was a challenge, but they felt very proud about the fact that they had been able to adapt and adjust when they were focused on COVID, only when they knew exactly what they needed to do, when everyone was coordinating and collaborating and learning together working across systems, they got very efficient in working with that particular issue. So as the surge passed, and they were going back to their regular way of being, they wanted to sustain... they wanted to maintain some of those habits of efficiency that they created in COVID. And so we worked with them to take interviews from leaders about what their experience had been before and during COVID. And what they saw as a transformation of their leadership in post COVID times, what were the things they wanted to keep, and what were the things they wanted to lose. And so we helped analyze that data and identify really specific tensions and decision making structures for those leaders who are moving through, into and out of now the COVID stress and time. At the same time, there are in that system, particular services that are overrun, like the emergency rooms, or the surgery decks that had to postpone surgeries during COVID. And so they are just overrun, and they're trying to decrease their wait times, decrease their wait links, and working on bringing together the human systems and the physical systems to be able to optimize both to reduce response time. And so they have engineers, and they have process experts to work on the facilities and resources. And we help them optimize the human systems to work in tandem with those. Charles Chandler 22:04 Well, you know, organizational effectiveness, theory and practice is sort of contested space. And there's a number of ideas about what is an effective organization, particularly things like if you achieve your objectives, you know, you're effective. Or if you're efficient, and internally, things are running smoothly. That's another way to look at it. But in your complex systems, that as you look at human systems and organizations in particular, what do you look for to determine whether it's performing well, Glenda Eoyang 22:41 We call it fit for function. And we really moved into this understanding and some research that we did with the National Research Center in Finland. They had asked the question, what is a sustainable organization? And for them, at that point, sustainability was the way they were thinking about effectiveness. And so there were interviews and data collected from six different companies. One was a two person construction company that had been around for 25 years. One was an education firm that was transitioning into more vocational training, and the largest one was their largest nuclear power plant. So we had six organizations, each one in a different size and phase and business of maturity and perspective and need complexity. And the question was, how could we use that data to define what a most sustainable effective organization was, we had very good time, and a lot of difficulty finding something that was the same across those boards. Because what was effective in one was quite different. And another one was a fast paced electronic manufacturing company that shifted every day in every way. And the nuclear power plant was very stable and structured. And the guys in the construction company, knew their customers had long term relationships and were really personable in the work that they did. And so we were looking for some kind of an understanding about resilience or effectiveness, that would cover this whole range of things. They were all very successful. That's why they were chosen. And what we realized was that each one was able to see and understand its environment in really subtle and important ways. They were able to understand and manage their internal functioning in ways that were most resource effective, and that they connected those two, that they could adjust and adapt their internal functioning to match They're their external environments. And so that those three characteristics, seeing and understanding the environment, having a handle on your internal processes and the resources required for those. And the third, and probably the most important one is the ability to stay keeping the two connected in a kind of adaptive way. So that was the definition that we came to about sustainability and effectiveness there. And we found it very useful at multiple scales for individuals who are trying to work effectively, for teams need to have the same external, internal and cooperative perspectives. Organizations, I think we're seeing in these days, industries that are running into the same kind of challenge, like the energy industry, in these days of climate change, and what they're needing to do to optimize their position and their histories. So I don't know how that fits. I'm not a student of organization effectiveness. So I'm not sure how that fits with the received theory and practice there. How does it, Charles? Charles Chandler 26:09 There are just so many viewpoints on organizational effectiveness. And it's... and it's such a contested space. We're trying to sort that out. We're... we're open to new views. Certainly. I followed your work for some time now. And I'm happy to talk to you today. We're coming to the end of our time together, though. What have we not talked about that you'd like to leave us with? Glenda Eoyang 26:35 Hmm. So one of the things that has been my greatest lesson over these 30 years is how important humility is and inquiry is in times of change, that our worst enemy is assumed certainty. Our greatest block are the things that we think are true or know to be true that are not. And so as we're moving into this time of rapid change, the ability to hold assumptions, but hold them lightly. plan for the future, but plan lightly. Respect others, and stand in inquiry, so that the questions that we ask are really the transforming agents that we have to work with. And so I appreciate the questions that you've brought and the questions that you bring through your podcast. So thank you for this chance to share human systems dynamics with you and your team. It's been a delight. Charles Chandler 27:35 Well, thanks, Glenda, for being on the show. It's been great having you. Glenda Eoyang 27:39 Thank you. It's nice to meet you. Take care. Charles Chandler 27:42 And that's about it for this episode. Join us again next time when we'll explore more stories about organizations and their performance, not just for themselves, but for the common good as well. In the meantime, you can explore all of our episodes on our website, www.AgeofOE.com. I'm your host, Charles Chandler saying so long for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai