Are management systems really systems?

This last week I've been reading about basic systems theory—specifically, Donella H. Meadows's primer, Thinking in Systems. And I've started to wonder about the management systems that we work with in the Quality business. Do these qualify as "systems" in Meadows's terminology? And if so, can systems theory teach us anything useful about how to design or implement a QMS?

The answer to the first question is an easy Yes. Meadows defines a "system" as "a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time." Since a management system is "a set of policies, processes and procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to achieve its objectives," it obviously qualifies. But the second question is more interesting, and I don't have a final answer yet.

What I have seen is just how well her basic list of the features of systems maps to our everyday experience. In Chapter Three ("Why Systems Work So Well") she lists three important features.

Resilience

Systems generally have feedback loops that allow them to self-correct when they go too far out of alignment in any direction. This doesn't necessarily mean that systems are static—quite the contrary! But it does mean that they respond and adapt to changing circumstances. And of course management systems are designed to do this too. 

• Organizations set goals, and then evaluate whether those goals have been met; in case the goals were missed, the organization has to make a decision how to react, and this typically means analyzing what went wrong and then correcting the goal (or the system) based on the analysis. 
• Formal management systems generally require internal (and sometimes external) audits, in order to find places where the system has broken down or is not effective; then the responsible functions have to take corrective action to repair the situation. 
• And formal management systems require some kind of regular management review, which again looks for areas that have to be improved. All of these methods involve providing a kind of feedback to the organization that allows it to adapt to circumstances.

What's more, Meadows's discussion of resilience also picks up some of the dysfunctions we have discussed when talking about bureaucracy. She recognizes that bureaucracy is how large organizations communicate internally, but when it gets too large the communication becomes too slow. 

Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion. [p. 78]

That was exactly the point of discussion between Scotlyn and me last spring.

Self-Organization

Normally when we ask about an organization's management system, we mean the part that is defined in the documentation, the part we can audit. But every organization displays regular, stable behaviors that are not covered in the documentation. All of these are the result of self-organization on the part of the people in the system, and they have an enormous impact on the way work gets done. 

Some of these behaviors can actively subvert the purpose of the management system, such as when people game their metrics to ensure they are always green.

Sometimes the behaviors don't affect the management system directly for good or for ill, but they define the spirit or culture of the organization.

And of course sometimes the unplanned (self-organized) actions of the people on the floor can be an enormous help. The whole reason that our profession now uses Quality Circles is that they are a formalization of what must originally have been a self-organized discussion among line workers who were trying to solve some production problem. Today we say that Quality Circles are part of the formal, documented system; but it is not possible that they started that way. We all know that informal methods always precede formal ones.

Hierarchy

Clearly every management system assumes the existence of some kind of hierarchy in its organization. The ISO 9001 standard, for example, has multiple references to "top management." (See clauses 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 9.3.) One of the first artifacts we auditors ask an organization for is an org chart, so we can understand the hierarchy and the associated responsibilities. Even in cases where a group of people are working together without any hierarchy at all—at first—Meadows says you can watch one grow spontaneously (as a result of self-organization!) in order to reduce chaos and confusion by imposing some kind of organization. (The German sociologist Robert Michels once stated, "Who says organization, says oligarchy.")

What fascinates me is a remark Meadows makes about how hierarchies develop:

Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up—from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team, from actual production to management of production. Early farmers decided to come together and form cities for self-protection and for making trade more efficient. Life started with single-cell bacteria, not with elephants. The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better. [p. 84. Emphasis added.]

This means the next time I do an audit, I should be able to ask the top management, "How do you help the people on the production line do their jobs better?" I want to remember that!

So management systems are indeed "systems" in the technical sense, and the common features of systems are things we all know from long experience working with management systems. I haven't decided yet whether there are other lessons to be derived from systems theory that might help us in the Quality business to do our jobs better. But I am continuing to think about it. If you know more than I do about this, please say so in the comments.