Whole Systems Working

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You already know there are no hiding places or backwaters left in the world where organisations can shelter. Future shock is here: your organisation faces the full brunt of the high-speed, global, networked economy, with all its potential for disruptive change. Your environment has speeded up, and therefore requires even speedier adaptation by the organisation, either when you are going after those emergent opportunities, or when you correctly anticipate changes to your landscape. And on the occasions when those changes out there cannot be anticipated, the minute you realise their significance, your response must be like lightning or they threaten your survival.

How can you solve complex problems in such fiendishly complicated circumstances and with time so critically of the essence? Moreover, once you've solved the problems, how can you implement actions, decisions and solutions fast enough for them to remain relevant and current in such a turbulent, competitive landscape?

The management imperative is weaker than ever: in an interconnected world, the leadership issues are now so cross- cutting that they don't lend themselves to linear direction by managers: they don't have the luxury of months of influencing and lengthy decision making. What is to be done?

The solution lies in harnessing the whole organisation by designing leading edge interventions that draw on the new science of complexity.

Complex Problem Solving using the Whole System, puts the whole (or a substantial microcosm) of the workforce and your other stakeholders, in a same place same time event (yes, the logistics can be challenging) in order to:

• Harness the amazing knowledge, perspective, intelligence and diversity of the workforce and its stakeholders to come up with answers that are both excellent and surprising (NO amount of sweat from your brightest managers slaving away in smoke filled rooms can develop the solutions that a neural network like this can create).
• Release the energy and goodwill locked in the System because people support what they helped to create. There is no lengthy line management, but instead massive parallel processing (hence the blistering speed of implementation) by people who are now ‘thinking global but acting local'.
• Maximise the possibilities for real-time decision- making because the stakeholders, including partners, managers, the workforce, and staff representatives are in one room at the same time and able to factor in the interests of the relevant parties (how we make this happen is technical but we're happy to explain it to you).
• Begin work immediately on the projects, initiatives and work streams in the event itself, whilst relationships are warm (and enthusiasm is hot!). We support these projects and work streams until the work is done.

We achieve our results, by design:

• Careful contracting with the senior sponsor in order to ensure that the Big Question is being posed to the System and that the ‘givens', the parameters and constraints within which the System must develop the answer, are made clear.
• Excellent event design based on many years of cumulative experience of design and delivery of these events.
• Design informed by a deep understanding of system dynamics, complex systems and participative whole systems methodologies. The need for speed drives the deployment of these insights.
• Careful assessment of the right intervention for the job, co-developed with your nominated, diverse planning team, so that we begin the event with their informed cross-organisation understanding of the issues. This way we ensure that the right questions you wish to post to the System, are deeply embedded in the design.
• By design, we take the emergent, transformational change that bubbles up from these events and we integrate this with rigorous project management of the work streams in order to get the job done.

Two brief examples of projects we've worked on using Whole systems methodologies
A global IT outsourcing company wanted to reality-check its strategy for growth with the workforce and with some of its customers, and also get their input on how to make the change happen. The large group identified further contributions to strategy and also new work streams, which the group then populated with great enthusiasm. The strategy team evaluated this as a roaring success.

The Government asked Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to take over the commissioning of Prison Health Care and required the local PCTs to work with their local prisons to develop the mechanism for doing this. We convened and facilitated a large group drawn from both primary care and the prison (including a group of prison inmates, i.e. the service users) to work out the local response, which was submitted on time to a tight deadline.