Collective Intelligence: New Age of Problem Solving
Humanistic Versus Systemic Problems
There are typically two kinds of interventions that can drive change in any organization, society, community or even a country. Every challenge we deal in the world, including our business today falls in one of these two categories.
1. Humanistic, and
2. Systemic
Primarily these two factors are responsible for creating problems in the organizations, and creating higher awareness around them is the only solution.
Humanistic issues are defined as something to do with the individual personalities and its related outcomes, known as the behavior. However, systemic issues are subtler and more complex to identify and define. Ironically, humanistic issues are to some extent, if not fully, responsible for the systemic issues.
When people focus only on their roles, they may play their part well, but they have little sense of responsibility for the overall results produced when all the parts interact. Likewise, when the results are disappointing, it is very difficult to know why? All people may say is- “someone screwed up.” Only higher understanding of the systemic behavior can help prevent such errors.
Here is an example of a humanistic and systemic problem.
We all know the increasing attacks of terrorists or naxalites in Kashmir and Chhattisgarh respectively. Typically, everyone tends to blame the government, and says it is not doing enough to control such attacks, or perhaps turning out to be a complete failure at managing these issues well. However, with systemic understanding, we can see that it is a vicious that both the government and terrorist organizations are stuck into. Let’s understand this further.
With the increasing pressure on government to eliminate terrorism and bring normalcy in the valley region, it tightens the security, set up more monitoring stations, and pushes more security personnels, thus resulting in increase in their movement. Terrorist outfits, on other hand, perceive this as an increased threat, and plan to respond. They either attack armed forces or recruit terrorists or sometimes both.
Similarly, with increased activities of terrorists, armed forces respond militarily.
This loop of actions and reactions from both the sides leads greater loss of lives, while each side accusing the other.
Below is a diagram that can help you understand more clearly this never ending actions & reactions from both the forces and the terrorist outfits. Both sides believe they are right in their approach to handling the escalating pressure, and what is primarily missing is the systemic understanding. It is system what’s causing the behavior.
Furthering this humanistic and systemic understanding to a real organizational challenge. For example.. when the business is low, first thing that strikes the employers’ mind is to cut costs, thus, causing some processes to change and shutdown a few facilities or services, finally resulting in terminating employees. Below is what happens at the employees’ end, and what customers experience.
Eventually what was started as a preventive/corrective action, started a chain reaction and caused everything to collapse.
Often, in order to understand issues/problems we like to dissect and break things apart, and that’s what we have been trained to do throughout our education, however, we tend to completely ignore the interconnectivity and interdependency that exist in the different components to make the whole.
Challenges caused by the system itself go largely unnoticed as they are non-obvious ones. So before we can even start finding solutions for them, the question stands before us is how do we even start seeing them at first? I’ll suggest two approaches of achieving this, but first, there must be a deeper and persistent commitment to learning.
- One should be absolutely open-minded and be prepared to be wrong. Because if it was that simple to understand or identify and do, then someone must have done it by now. Be ready to accept that you are part of the problem. Your own mental approach, and your own way of seeing things is probably part of the problem. You need to expand your learning horizon in order to see the non-obvious.
- We must form a team of responsible and capable individuals with different point of view who can see different parts of the system, to collectively start seeing the system. Something they individually can not see, so that we can create collective intelligence.
Remember, before you even start seeing the areas of high leverage, it may take some time, to develop, adept and apply the new knowledge, so be patient and stay committed.