When it’s coming to improving organizations and bringing organization to use their full potential while increasing the potential, there are three main elements in organizations that have a major impact on such a work: People, management and technologies.
People
People are the basic building block of organizations, the basic particles that create the complex system we call the organization. People are driven by visible, hidden, known and unknown mental models, biases and fallacies that impact their behavior and actions. Understanding this layer is basic to any effort related to organizations. Ignoring this aspect is one of the main causes of many failures in organizations.
People also interact with each other. This interaction has many shades, and it’s crucial to understand how organizations are working. Interactions are also causing challenges. Understanding the interaction between people is also crucial for improving any aspect of an organization.
Management, not processes
Because of the natural tendency of a social system to become complex and unexpected, people add over time constraints and guide to improve predictability in an organization and decrease uncertainty. We call this set of guidelines and constraint management.
Management includes structure, principles, policies, procedures, processes that dealing with attracting people, motivating them to do the work continuously better, coordination, prioritization, resolving conflict and any other elements that can decrease unpredictability.
Management is an important sub-system in organizations that are working on top of the natural interlinks between people with a clear target but many challenges. Understanding management and its impact on people and their interaction are key.
Processes are a small part of management. Most of the cases, they are just the manifestation of deeper elements of management. Focusing on processes is a focus on the obvious but not necessary for the most crucial part of management. Therefore, we are focused on management and not just on processes.
Technologies
Last but not least, we see technologies as independent elements that create organizations. As social systems technologies are also complex systems created by many elements and proven to introduce unexpected behavior. On a different scale, but a still unexpected behavior. Although they are an abstraction of people’s work, technologies are independent and diverse elements in the fabric that we call organizations. It can be a small app or sophisticated robot using artificial intelligence and machine learning; both are basic elements in the fabric of organizations.
Connecting those three is crucial to understanding organizations and resolve problems
None of the above three elements stay by itself. All three are interdependently on each other. Understanding how those three mashed and used by a company is what anyone wants to improve a company should be after. Understanding each one of the components above is not enough there must be an overall view of all of those three components as one entity to understand organizations, identify challenges and resolve them.