In my last post, I defined process from a systems thinking perspective as “the behavior of people and machines, in which clear patterns exist in the execution of activities and the relation between these executions and that converts certain inputs to certain outputs and produces value”. 
Funny: I have been working with architecture for some years already (still learning), and manage to overlook the Archimate definition of a process: “A business process represents a sequence of business behaviors that achieves a specific outcome such as a defined set of products or business services.“

There we have it again: behavior.  

Socio-technical systems show behavior, leading to certain outcomes. A great book on systems 
thinking is the “Thinking in Systems – a primer” by Donella Meadows. She taught me that to help a system towards other outcomes, you need to learn to dance with it. It made me realize my mission in life: to learn to dance with systems of people and technology, and help create movement in these systems towards outcomes with more value and meaning for all stakeholders.  

In the book, she explains that there are different properties that a system can have – and explains that changing these characteristics can have an effect on each other. An vital property is Resilience – “a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment.”  So: if changes occur (temporarily or permanent) in the environment, is the system than able to respond effectively and find a new way of operating.

Meadows writes “I see resilience as a plateau upon which the system can play, performing its normal functions in safety”. She writes “As a system loses its resilience, its plateau shrinks, and its protective walls become lower and more rigid, until the system is operating on a knife-edge, likely to fall off in one direction or another whenever it makes a move. Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space. One day it does something it has done a hundred times before and crashes.”

Now, as process consultant I am often asked to help the system to improve in terms of efficiency and productivity. Thanks to Meadows I now start to deeper understand that interventions in a system, aimed at short-term improvement of efficiency, can have a negative effect on resilience.
So perhaps we made the system better, faster, cheaper, but made it less able to respond effectively to changes in its environment in the long run!
Meadows states: “Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience— the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.”

Now I want to make the link to process improvement. I think when helping to improve socio-technical systems, it is important to keep an big eye on the resilience. That’s not easy, Meadows: ” Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.”

An important property that a system needs for Resilience is the ability to self-organize: to reorganize itself when changes in the environment require this. But how do you enhance the self organization capability of a system?

Well, I think it’s the ability of the people in the system to collectively learn and adapt!

It suddenly dawned on me: process improvement efforts should never just focus on improving efficiency – it should be also, or even primarily be focused on helping the organization build a capability of learning and self-organizing. And perhaps you can develop the capability to learn, by helping people practicing process improvement (how can we do things right), and then help them to learn (through customer/market orientation) to further learn them stay effective (find the right things to do).

Concluding: applying Lean, BPM, Six Sigma just for efficiency can be a dangerous thing: we make the system more productive/efficient in the short run, but might negatively effect resilience. So: help the system by strengthening their learning capability to do the right things right.

(I guess the next post will require me to dive into first & second order learning)