Systems, purpose, and perspective: Pointers to Wholehearted’s philosophical influences

Previously: Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Next: OODA loop takeaways

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

A week ago today, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation was released in print, and I thought it might be interesting to expand on some of its philosophical influences. Given that I describe the book as exploring the fascinating (and dare I say somewhat politicised) intersection between systems, complexity, and dialogic/generative organisation development, why not start with the concept of ‘system’?

In Chapter 1, I wrote this about them:

Calling [something] a ‘system’ indicates nothing more than that its function is fulfilled through multiple interacting parts … . The word should not be taken to imply the design of some outside authority; as we will see, these things can come together and change of their own accord. In our multiple-perspective approach, it is not even essential that participants agree on their composition or their boundaries.

Out of context, some might take issue with that word ‘function’. By it, I meant something like “what it does”, alluding to Stafford Beer’s famous dictum, “the purpose of a system is what it does”. But if that’s our starting point for an appreciation of systems, it introduces problems of its own.

Addressing one possible objection, my friend Matt Lloyd improves significantly on POSIWID with “the purpose of a system is what it does based on the perspective of the observer” [1]. That’s an important change that aligns with Wholehearted’s multi-perspective approach. However, we remain in problematic territory if Beer’s ‘purpose’ carries the implication of intent, something that my quoted paragraph is at pains to avoid. I’m inclined to treat his use of that word as a rhetorical flourish and a playful tease (I’ve been guilty of that myself), but it’s important to keep in mind that while some systems are designed and implemented with deliberate intent, most aren’t.

To help avoid that unsafe assumption, sharp-eyed readers of Wholehearted may notice the influence of philosopher Alicia Juarerro [2], and from a more continental tradition, of assemblage theory and other concepts from New Materialist philosophy [3]. (And let me pause here for a moment to express my gratitude to the friends I’ve made while studying them together!) For a little taste, see Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method [4]:

Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical analytic question is always: Given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?

Taking those various sources together, let’s expand that question into an approach that begins with something other than purpose and the process by which it is fulfilled:

We begin with some specific situation, the effects it produces, and how they are experiencedWe then look to the assemblages of things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or by their narrative or explanatory power affect each other [5] – contributing to the situation and our experience of it by constraining each other, activating or suppressing certain tendenciesFor anything that might fall into the category of “a label [for] something we think we already know about”, we increase our confidence in their reality by accounting for their emergence

One interesting and widely observed example of a situational and emergence-producing tendency goes like this: rewarding interactions tend to get repeated [6]. What constitutes ‘rewarding’ may vary widely between individuals, but still this tendency contributes to the formation and maintenance of social relationships and larger social structures. Inside an organisation, those informal networks and the organisation’s formally recognised structures and processes interact with each other. Together, they affect how each person experiences the organisation and the possibilities that they imagine for it. That in turn affects their preferences and choices, and thereby what interactions get repeated!

Within this complex dynamic, organisational forms and the flows of material and information can be understood both as products of that process and also as participants in it, the point being that they are not the only possible starting point for inquiry. One has to start somewhere, and it’s understandable that these are common choices, but let’s face it: confronted with that complexity, it can’t hurt to try some alternatives. Indeed, I argue in Wholehearted that if your goal is to tap into what the book calls the organisation’s ‘adaptive capacity’, you might want to start elsewhere.

Back now to Chapter 1, and to one of several ways to arrive at three key systems highlighted in my previous post [7]. The situation we begin with comprises the following: the organisational scopes with which participants each identify, the value-creating work of those scopes, and the fact that this work is not in such complete chaos that any sense of identity is lost. What then constrains that value-creating work to the extent that it has some coherence? There are very many answers to that question, many of which we can divide into two groups:

Those that have some coordinating effect, helping in a general sense to keep the work within safe and effective limits of operation (and perhaps helping also to make certain interpersonal interactions easier and more rewarding)Those that have an organising effect, in terms of what the work is currently organised around and guided towards (and also perhaps to motivate new social structures)

That division may seem arbitrary, but it works, it receives support from multiple and diverse sources, and there’s no denying the reality of the detail involved. From that initial system, the value-creating work, we have identified two further systems, coordinating and organising. These are the names [8] I give to what Stafford Beer called Systems 1, 2, and 3 in his Viable System Model [9], the first three of six. This is the model reconstructed bottom-up in Wholehearted as the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive model of the digital-age organisation and scopes therein. Then, and situationally: How do we experience each of the mutual relationships between those systems? Can we imagine them being healthier and more productive? Taking that further, how might we and other stakeholders experience them in the ideal? What stops that?

That’s quite a turn! What looked like analysis has become something generative, a different way for groups to explore this rich and complex space, to see and articulate new possibilities for it, and to identify focuses for change. It’s using the model as a framework for inquiry, much more open than “What’s your process?”, “Explain the design of your system of work”, or “By what principles and with what intent was your system of work designed?”. If you 1) allow that different people experience those relationships differently, and 2) give them the opportunity to make new sense of them together, you might be surprised at how much can be achieved without the formal aspects of organisation and process being documented. Those aspects can (and do) look after themselves until some specific topic of conversation brings them to the foreground. What’s important meanwhile is that participants will be identifying some real challenges and/or exciting opportunities that they are motivated to engage with. Surely that’s worth something?

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Matt Lloyd PLY, William Bartlett, Colin Freeth, John Cumming, Christian Fredriksson , and Johan Ivari for their input and feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Next: OODA loop takeaways

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[1] Matt Lloyd, Speed so Fast it Felt Like I Was Drunk, System Soundbites blog (systemsoundbites.com, 2024)

[2] Alicia Juarerro, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (2023) and Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (2002)

[3] Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2019)

[4]  Ian Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide (2020). This one isn’t referenced in Wholehearted – it’s the next book for our reading circle, and I haven’t finished it yet!

[5] “Things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or their narrative or explanatory power affect each other” – Juarerro and DeLanda emphasising things whose existence we can make certain of, Buchanan placing more emphasis on how we experience them.

[6] Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979)

[7] Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Not wanting to go there (so to speak), for what are here called ‘systems’, I used the more neutral term of ‘aspects’.

[8] Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.com 2025)

[9] Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (1972) and The Heart of Enterprise (1979)