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When the All Blacks threw the nation into mourning with their loss at the Rugby World Cup, among the pundits people turned to for answers was management systems specialist Dr Kambiz Maani.
He was frustrated by their search for the instant solution. It's not like that, he told
them. Don't just focus on this one event, look deeper - try and understand how the All Blacks machine works at every level. Maybe then they would find their answer.
"It's not about one single variable, it's a combination of them," he says. "What was happening on the field was one event."
The associate professor of systems and management sciences at the University of Auckland's Business School wishes the media and public weren't so superficial. Nobody takes the time to figure out how things work beneath, who the stakeholders are and how the collective effort works.
To look for blame is a lazy way of approaching things, says the co-author of the textbook, Systems Thinking, System Dynamics: Managing Change and Complexity*.
"Blame is a simplistic way of looking at things, which gives you a level of comfort," says Maani.
In his opinion, there is a systemic solution for the All Blacks' woes for anyone who cares to look into it.
"If you don't understand the process you don't understand the event," he says.
Systems thinking, put simply, is a holistic way of thinking about the world, work and life based on the primacy of relationships.
In advising companies on systems management, he tells them to look at patterns and to unravel relationships.
Managers need tools and this is what Maani teaches in his executive courses. They have to be given a language for thinking; a language for deciphering their organisation's complex structures. Systems language is visual. Simulation models are created to help understand the structure of the system and the relationships between components.
New Zealanders, individualists that they are, are not the greatest at thinking about the benefit of the whole.
"We are a very individual culture. It's about everyone doing their best, not the best for everyone," says Maani, who has lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and Rand Corporation in the US.
From a corporate point of view, New Zealand companies often reject selling part of themselves to an investor, foreign or local, because they don't want to lose control, even though the investment might propel the company forward.
The recent council elections were a good opportunity to study your motivations. Did you think holistically or was it all about you?
"Did you think, what's in it for me, or who is the best person for the city?" asks Maani. "Think about the system and the relative [parts]. If the whole prospers, everyone prospers."
In order to get to the heart of their company's complex systems, executives have to be given time and this is one of his concerns.
In a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Leadership, CEOs interviewed said they spent 55 per cent of their time on compliance, 30 per cent on email and 15 per cent on everything else. The leadership expert finds this alarming.
"There is no time for thinking. Instead of being thinkers, they are becoming reactors. Everyone expects a solution."
His concern is that if you don't give people time, there will be no creativity, no breakthrough thinking.
And this thinking time should be found not just for management; it should be for everyone in the organisation, says Maani. People should have permission to experiment.
Companies rely too heavily on data information, he says. "They analyse everything to death but you have to understand the patterns not the data. It gives them confidence but ... data is [just] a reflection of events.
If companies behaved bearing the whole in mind, fewer errors would be made..
"Very smart people make very poor decisions because their level of understanding of complexity is limited," says Maani.
A classic example of where a decision is made in isolation is where a company's marketing and manufacturing arm are not working in sync.
The marketing executives make promises to clients which the manufacturing arm can't possibly keep.
Then, as the orders come in and manufacturers can't deliver, the marketers end up with unhappy clients.
It's a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. "This happens in many other ways," says Maani.
Many business decisions are made in isolation, perhaps under the pressure of time.
The trend for companies to manufacture overseas may be an example of a decision today that will come back to bite companies, suggests Maani.
"It may be good for the economic short term, the labour costs are better but the disadvantages could be quality control, you don't have the same degree of control over the workforce," he says.
It may end in increasing defects in the products, among other things. "There are consequences."
Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds will have an interesting challenge when he breaks up the corporation. With his British experience, he has been quoted as saying it works well; each division gets to concentrate on its particular customer. There could be pitfalls in this if each division makes decisions with no thought as to how this will affect the others, warns Maani.
"In systems thinking, you have to understand the impact of different decisions. I've seen a lot of it in major companies," he says.
Holistic management in managing change and complexity leads to sustainability, claims the associate professor.
Maani recently encouraged a company's executives to look for links between two separate problems which they had never talked about in the same room. One problem was, they were losing market share. The other was that staff turnover was up. Typically, they would have increased promotion, to help increase market share.
Maani pointed out the connection. Every time they lost people, they lost ground in the relationship with a client.
"The solution was a small collective action, in this case marketing and HR. Rather than pouring money into promoting and discounting, they put the money into recognition of staff, making it a much more sustainable and stable business rather than a quick fix," he says.
* Gill South is a freelance business writer based in Auckland
* Systems Thinking, System Dynamics: Managing Change and Complexity By Kambiz E. Maani and Robert Y. Cavana(Pearson Education NZ, $94.99 with CD)
Systems thinking
* A way of thinking about things that stresses the importance of relationships.
* Aims to provide a language for understanding change and complexity.
* Emphasises the connections between various factors.
* Often uses diagrams to help understand relationships.
* Tries to get away from making decisions in isolation and to understand the wider effects of decisions or strategies.
