Systemantics: The Systems Bible
By John Gall
Rather than telling you how to approach systems design, this snarky book seems more interested in impressing upon you the various ways in which systems design is arduous and unpredictable.
View on AmazonA temporary patch will very likely become permanent
Once you introduce a system or feature it tends to stick around. Sometimes it is possible to get rid of an existing feature but that is hard to do.
Since Systems generally Don't Go Away, and since they occupy space, our landscape is now littered with the bleached bones and rotting carcasses of old attempted solutions to our problems: THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM or, as even more poignantly formulated by Parkinson: THE GHOST OF THE OLD SYSTEM CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE NEW.
Functionary's Fault
A complex set of malfunctions induced in a Systems-person by immersion in the System, and primarily attributable to sensory deprivation (that is to say, to lack of alternative, or contrasting, experiences).
"Sensory deprivation" is an interesting way to describe what can happen when you are too immersed in a system. The book also describes a hypnotic effect that a system can have on its members, where they are lulled into a certain pattern of thinking and fail to think critically or observe what is actually going on around them.
System designers build in ways to bypass the system
Designers of systems tend to design ways for themselves to bypass the system.
This is one of those things that seems intuitively true to me but I struggle to come up with any concrete examples. It does seem true that if I design a new system, that system will play to my individual strengths. I'm not going to propose a system that I won't be able to excel in. This would seem to spell trouble for managers who are trying to create systems that their direct reports will have to follow. If the manager can't detach themselves from their own perspective the resulting system will not work for the employees.
Administrator's Anxiety
Pushing harder on the non-functioning system to make it work better.
It doesn't work.
Working complex systems evolve from working simple systems
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
This makes sense to me. It you should start with a simple system with as few moving pieces as possible to reduce complexity and dependencies.
Judge a system by how it fails... or how it operates in failure mode
What the System is supposed to be doing when everything is working well is really beside the point, because that happy state is rarely achieved in real life. The truly pertinent question is: How does it work when its components aren’t working well? How does it fail? How well does it work in Failure Mode?
"The message sent is not necessarily the message received."
What you think you're saying might not be what your audience hears.
Introduce new systems only as a last resort
In setting up a new system, tread softly. You may be disturbing another system that is actually working.
The very first principle of systems design is a negative one: Do it without a new system if you can.
Interestingly, not every organizational change needs to be backed by a brand new system. These quotes remind me to think about what we are already doing that is working and try to adapt those existing processes and behaviors to get new things done.
On the danger of taking too much feedback
Too much feedback can overwhelm the response channels, leading to paralysis and inaction. Even in a system designed to accept massive feedback (such as the human brain), if the system is required to accommodate to all incoming data, equilibrium will never be reached. The point of decision will be delayed indefinitely, and no action will be taken.
Collecting feedback is important but too much feedback can lead to inaction. If you look hard enough you will find a representative opinion for every possible perspective. It can be hard to move forward at that point.
The naming effect
The name is most emphatically not the thing.
People, through finding something 'beautiful,' think something else 'unbeautiful.'
Being able to assign names to things is the power to bring new "realities" into existence. When you name something you are defining a framework around which the concept will always be considered. Naming puts things into a specific frame of reference and from that point forward things are measured against that frame.
I'm thinking about the term "fake news" and how all news is now judged in that frame—it's either fake or true. If someone doesn't personally consider a news item to be fake, it must be true, and that is a dangerous dichotomy. There must be some middle ground where you encounter a news item and think critically about the source and potential biases inherent in it. It's not necessarily true or fake; it has strengths and flaws and biases that you must consider before forming your opinion.
You are always communicating
It is impossible to not communicate.
Even if you say nothing at all, your silence speaks.
The meaning of a communication is the behavior that results
It doesn't matter what you say, what matters is how it is interpreted and the outcome that results. Measure your communication in terms of outcomes.
Reference
Gall, J. (2002). The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small. United States: General Systemantics Press.