Skip to main content

Understanding Large System Intervention


To identify the symptoms through various interventions and defining the pain areas of large systems or units beyond the scope of an individual, due to environmental or internal changes, is the Large System Intervention.

But are we looking at the right system?

The way to go about it is, to discard first and foremost the solution and focus on the pain areas. Looking at the pain dispassionately helps to intervene every day at a mindset level and helps to bring about the change.

How to intervene the systems?

Diagnostic Intervention is a revolutionary approach, whose premise is that the change agent acts as catalysts, making a difference but is not a part of the system.

Dialogic Intervention is an evolutionary approach whose premise is to equip people with the capability to take decision, sensing the change, where organization is continuously learning and unlearning. The consultant here is a part of the system.

Kodak, failed because of asking wrong marketing question, the strategic frame became a blinder, it could not adapt to new marketplace and new consumer attitudes . It became resistant to change.

Kodak made a classic mistake: it didn’t ask the right question, such as, what business are we in?” and not “how do we sell more products?” It focused on selling more products, instead of the business that it was in, storytelling.

 For both of the cases a diagnostic model would be rightfully used, to navigate the patterns in complexity rather as your confirmation bias.

What are the conditions to change the organisation?

  • DVF change formula

Dissatisfaction x Vision x First action > Resistance to change and how it plays out in different scenario.

As rightfully explained by 009, this also helps us to understand organization in two scenarios

  • How Transformation can happen in a successful organisation?
  • How transformation can happen in a stable organisation?


The key message of the formula, the condition , that when met, will move an individual, group, or a whole system. That is, everyone from the CEO down to the shop floor people, need to be aligned with each variable of DVF, else the model won’t work .For example. If the bottom-up problems are not acknowledged by the top leaders, it’s not a true D.

To paraphrase Ackoff (1981), a pioneer in the field of Systems Thinking, everyone’s world view is horribly distorted by being their own. People are quite often in touch with their perceptions while understanding or caring bare minimum about anyone else’s. An excellent implementation of the change formula means being inquisitive to others contribution towards collective understanding of each of the variable as well as advocating for the value you add from your point of view.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

17/06/2019 – M2018OD009

Today is my first class of Large Scale Intervention Process . I was not able to attend the class because I was on the way to Mumbai. I didn’t get a train ticket so I have to travel through bus and bus reached Mumbai 3 hrs late. So for this class I didn’t have any idea what happened but I read a chapter of the book my group has assigned for me for the next class. The chapter was on whole system transformation and the book talks about five truths of whole system transformation. I found it very common because most of the OD diagnosing model also talked about these truths. I came to know through the book that there are some 5 to 6 masters in OD who gave these truths and based on these truths anybody can create his/her own model. These five truths are System, Purpose, Journey, Theory, Values .i.e. Every transformation should have systemic view, try to assess the problem with whole system perspective, It should have purpose driven, Transformation should have been proper planned and based...
2 comments
Read more

Large System Interventions - my first understandings

I would like to use this post and the further threads to help us get a clarity on the Term LSI and a bit into what interventions are? Large system intervention, why do we call it as such? Large - The term large here refers to groups or units that are beyond the scope of an individual's understanding. When we say Large it means that it is not the capability of one person to work on the unit/entity because one person cannot grasps its magnitude, System - we use the term system here because large units or entities interact wth their environments and also interact internally with their parts. In large entities there are two aspects that become part  of the change 1) The interaction with and balance with the external environment 2) the fit of all its internal parts A large system intervention aims to take up two  key aspects,the organisation environment relationship and the interaction of its internal components Interventions - Intervention means to...
2 comments
Read more

How to calculate ROI of Large system change intervention?

It’s true that companies spend a lot on large system change interventions; this makes it very crucial that companies are able to measure the added value. Companies always need to know if they are getting return on investment; even if we are getting ROI how can we calculate it? One of the reasons that ROI can be particularly difficult to calculate is the different factors that impact an intervention. These factors can be time and quality but are not essentially quantity and money therefore is difficult to put into a basic equation of: output / input equals productivity (output/input = value). Real problem here is that if we consider that if money as input, output will be money too. However this is not always the case in terms of large system change intervention. So how do we measure an impact which can be expressed as currency value? Calculating the full financial ROI of Large System interventions has been elusive resulting in undermining the perceived credibility of large syst...
1 comment
Read more