Unusual problems call for unusual solutions

Organisations should tap into the whole system intelligence to take important decisions to cope with the economic crisis. The economic slow-down and the financial crisis in India has put CEOs and promoters under pressure. While a few segments of the industry would be more affected than others, the ripple effect is seen and felt everywhere. Organisations have already taken measures to cut costs, streamline operations, build partnerships and there is this anxious whisper and uneasy tension in corridors and boardrooms.

The coming months can be decision making times for senior leadership of Indian organisations. Decisions that are vital to the health of their organisations and employees. These decisions then need to be communicated and the entire organisation needs to be aligned with the new decisions. When it comes to taking tough decisions, asking important and difficult questions and taking a stand, most leaders still follow a traditional command and control path, which creates tremendous resistance, tension and uncertainty across the whole organisation in times of change.

Most of the decision making happens at the executive level. Command and control system assumes that the leader has all answers and all he needs is a bunch of people who could execute what he knows. At times like this when the problems are chaotic and complex, depending on the wisdom of the leader or the top team alone is foolish. How could then leaders involve the entire organisations in times of complexities and navigate through ambiguities? The answer is to effectively use the whole system intelligence. This way the leadership team can involve and engage the whole system in the process so that they do not have to later communicate and align everyone to a change agenda.

So the leadership team’s challenge now is in engaging the whole system and tapping into the whole system intelligence for actions that would help the organisation cope with the present crisis. One way of doing this is to use whole system approaches to planning and implementing change and what have come to be known as large group methods.

All organisations and communities are strongly influenced by factors and events that lie outside their boundaries. A shared understanding of these environmental influences – in the past and the present – has been an important aspect of popular large group interventions.

Large group intervention designs that allow people up to thousands to come together to co-create the destiny is what organisations would be using instead of boardroom decision making that then needs to percolate down. Command and control based management practices feel insecure to use the whole system and leaders feel others will not agree to the idea. But the fact is if leaders can involve all stakeholders, tap into the whole system intelligence, the system would be able to see the problem in a holistic way and take decisions that would have an agreement from all.

So, the need of hour for leaders is to create large group intervention platforms where a significant number of people in the organisation can come together to take effective decisions that affect their lives and organisations’ future. Tapping into the whole system intelligence, gives voice to greater numbers of stakeholders, promotes whole system organisational learning, produces faster and more sustainable change, generates higher levels of commitment from organisation members, and achieves business results.