Are we making progress?

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)



In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some
progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that



people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do


there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some
of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss
for the “answer”


mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved


they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose


the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the
conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people
could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational
tasks).



John comments

"My client also reflected on how shifting the focus away
from “behavioural problems” as isolated events and onto the business as a
whole living system seemed to have injected some new life (his words,
not mine) into the business: that they were actually going somewhere.
 Here was an example of the practical benefits of applying systems
thinking to overcoming business “stuckness”.  They started the year
stagnating, with things getting worse, they injected some new learning
into the system, they are now moving to another level of effectiveness."

 The lesson John draws from this story is about entropy. He suggests

"Closed systems that spend their energy simply on maintaining themselves
in survival mode eventually spend themselves out.  If a business is
spending too much of its time on hunting for food, and not enough on
learning new ways to hunt for food, it will succumb to entropy.  Vibrant
and open living systems naturally tend to greater complexity,
experiment often, are driven to what is possible and seek new
opportunities which destabilise them until they restablise in a renewed
way.  They look for more stuff to put into the system to renew it."

This is a good point, but I drew a couple of other important conclusions from his story as well.  Firstly, that it is possible to shift from "stuckness" to "progress". Secondly, that it is possible to make small progressive changes that may build towards larger progressive change.



Possible but clearly not inevitable. What we need to understand better is how to encourage and foster this kind of progressive change.





... to be continued ...