Directions for next thirteen questions: Read the following passage-3 and answer the questions given at the end of the passage. The answers should be based either on the author’s views or inferences drawn from the given passage.
Passage-3
The systems perspective, applied to organizations in its classic formulations as an organic or a cybernetic model, is open to criticism for failing to give a sufficient account of change. In the organic model, change is seen primarily as an adaptive response by the system, acting as a whole or through subsystems with specific functions, to maintain itself in balance with a shifting environment. Change is thus externalised beyond the system boundary. The organism’s response is characterized as a negative feedback process by means of which a control centre becomes
aware of a disparity between actual and desired behaviour or conditions and triggers actions to reduce the disparity. The model assumes that the organism is so constituted as to be able to detect significant disparities and to be able to adjust its behaviour in response to them.
When the organic model is generalized to apply to organizations, the emphasis on boundary, environment, feedback and adaptive response are carried over, and management is readily identified as the control centre, which directs the organization’s• operations. However, organizations do not possess the same unity or consistency of form as organisms. Their external boundaries, as well as internal boundaries between subsystems, are less evident and less fixed. Responses to internal and external problem situations are not generally preset or inbuilt, but have to be invented. Applied uncritically, the model attributes too central a role to management and overestimates management’s power to control events and actions. Direction of operations comes not from an integrated control
centre but from a multiplicity of factors whose behaviour is not merely adaptive but also creative and contentious.
The cybernetic model provides a more elaborate account of control and communication mechanisms organized hierarchically and recursively and distributed throughout the system. It also includes an environmental scanning function, which opens up the possibility of proactive change in the system. Nevertheless, although change becomes a subtler, complex and generalized phenomenon in this model, changes are still seen as adjustments, whether reactive or proactive, which serve to maintain or increase order in the system. Nor is it any easier to relate change to human agency in the cybernetic model than in the organic.
In the “soft systems” approach articulated by Checkland, attention shifts from the actual constitution of organizations as complex systems towards organizational actors’ understandings and formulations of problem situations. This is a view, which allows and expects multiple interpretations of the world at hand. When soft systems methodology (SSM) is applied to a problem situation in an organization, it culminates in a debate which aims to define changes which are “systemically desirable and culturally feasible”. The human role in defining (and subsequently carrying out) changes is thus recognized.
The soft systems approach makes change more central to organizational life’ than it is in the harder approaches sketched above, which focus on the system’s capacity to cope with and respond to environmental perturbations. Change now becomes something, which flows from human understanding and decision-making, which is not in general prefigured or automatic, and which involves negotiation by competing parties. However, some of the legacy of the earlier systems views persists in the soft systems approach and methodology, and serves to prevent fuller
appreciation of the nature of change in organizational life. For instance, the central notion of transformation in the methodology relates still to the transformation of inputs into outputs by the system, rather than to transformation of the system itself. Analysis and modelling in SSM, by and large, is conducted by the analyst alone, so that some of the most important interpretations in the change exercise are supplied by external experts. When the conceptual model is brought forward by the analyst for organizational debate, the voice of management is likely to be dominant, again restricting opportunity for a more thoroughgoing review of possibilities. Thus, even though the soft systems approach brings change to the centre of the organizational stage by focusing on human activity systems and embracing the interpretative standpoint, change is still characterized as a discontinuous step from an old order to a new one, facilitated by the alchemy of the analyst, and sanctioned by management.
In the systems tradition as discussed so far, there is a common interest in how complex systems achieve, maintain and increase order, in a turbulent environment, which threatens to invade or dissolve them. In the organic model, change is essentially an external threat to be responded to. Richer notions of change are developed in the cybernetic and soft systems approaches, but still, change is seen as a way of preserving or improving order in the system, rather than as a fundamental feature of the system itself. In the translation of systems concepts to organizational models, the identification of control with management has produced an impression that organizational change must be managed, and that managers, in alliance with experts, can and should manage change.
It has always been clear that organizations are not organisms, but the limitations of applying the organic metaphor have only become obvious relatively recently, when the pace of organizational and technological change has thrown into question the contemporary validity of organizational models based on central control, stability and bureaucracy. It may be that continuous change is an essential feature of organizations or it may be that disorder is
not only tolerable in organizations but also natural and productive. To contemplate these possibilities, it is necessary to go beyond the familiar systems models and at the same time to question ideas of change management.
Kiel, following an earlier formulation by Jantsch, describes three stages in the development of models of organizational change. The first stage, deterministic change, is a mechanical or linear view, which equates to a pre-systems or early systems view of organizations as machines subject to rational control. The second stage, equilibrium-based change, is essentially the systems perspective, especially as represented by the organic or cybernetic models. The third stage, dissipative or transformation change, views organizations as dynamic self-organizing systems capable of radical transformation as well as gradual evolution, and continually moving between
order and disorder and between stability and instability. Organizational models in this third stage go beyond (or may be seen to extend) the systems tradition, drawing on theories of chaos, complexity and self-organization from the natural sciences. New holistic theories of change are emerging which challenge the centrality of order and control in complex systems.
According to these theories, many complex systems are non-linear, i.e. systems in which relationships between cause and effect are not constant. Therefore, small inputs can sometimes lead to’ disproportionately large con sequences (and at other times not), and small variations in initial conditions can sometimes produce large variations in outcomes (and sometimes not). Generally, processes cannot be fully controlled or planned, and cannot be run back and repeated. Many natural systems, including ecologies and the weather, are non-linear. They are characterized by complex multiple patterns of interaction which combine with random disturbances to produce unpredictable events that will sometimes transform the system into an entirely new configuration. In general, as they move from one relatively stable region of behaviour to another, such systems pass through a chaotic transition phase. A system far from equilibrium and at the edge of chaos is one on the point of transformative change, but the future state of the system is not predictable.
It seems attractive to adopt a transformational model of organizational change derived from these more general ideas of dynamic non-linear systems. The complexity, uncertainty and centrality of change processes seem much better captured in this kind of model than in earlier systems models. However, it should be remembered that just as organizations are not organisms, neither are they weather systems or whirlpools. Organizations are constituted by people, not particles. Change is produced not by the complex interaction of effectively structureless atoms, but by the meaningful and value-laden interaction of already complex individual human beings.
Though it may indeed be fruitful to see organizations as non-linear systems, to do so will require a fundamental shift in our understanding of the role and limits of control and likewise of the role and limits of management. It would, for instance, be fallacious to assume that management can apply the transformational model in order to produce a desirable transformation in their organization, since this would be to treat non-linear systems as though they were
linear (and so predictable and controllable). Another danger is that by simply adopting the language of non-linear systems we will produce a spurious jargon and mystification which will lead neither to increased understanding nor to practical action in organizational life. The theories of chaos and complexity are seductive, and can easily lead you into a world of butterfly effects, strange attractors and NK fitness landscapes. Nevertheless, a cautious and sober application of them might prove fruitful in our area of interest.
Choose the correct statement from the following: