Ram says Organizations are Social Systems
Ram Charon is interviewed by Workforce about the nature of leadership in organizations.
"the work gets done from a meshing of the parts of the organization. When people work together, that is by design a social system. Leaders need to understand these relationships and how people communicate—they need to understand the social systems. If you don’t know how they work, you can’t be successful. That’s new to the 21st century."
It is no longer sufficient to define strategy and map processes. Organizational leaders need to develop effective methods of understanding the social systems that make up their businesses. If this sounds like psycho-babble or Kumbyah to you, then the challenge is in finding pragmatic ways to get a handle on the way people communicate when they work together. Lean, Six Sigma, BPR, and other process improvement efforts unleashed a wave of productivity from organizations between 1950 and 2000. The next wave is in improving the way people innovate, coordinate, learn, and commit. Does this sound like psycho-babble mumbo jumbo to you? What are you doing to find ways to get a handle on the creating productive collaboration in the social systems that make up your organization?