Requisite Organization: A Systems Theory for Organizational Systems

Arthur (Art) Mann Gold Rat taught us was how to think differently about how we manufactured with this theory of constraints. And also he came up with this theory of not luck, about cause and effect trees, about how you would think. And that the Japanese taught us the Ishikawa diagrams and for systems, they taught us to use how to do what they call taguchi experiments. And so all these were ways of thinking in the way of analyzing problems in a process industry like ours. The point came with all this in the background and these were the systems that we were using. And meanwhile, I was searching, I always searched for how to organize management systems. You would read Drucker, you can read. I've got a shelf full of God knows how many books and all of which telling you to go 50 different directions. Books on leadership, what leaders did, what they didn't do, how they acted. But none of it was any real help. It was a fragmented use this, use that. This is good, this is a good thing to do. This is how you organize. This is how you do an organization chart. And if nothing ever worked in how to as a system, because as a founding machining operation, we think in systems, in a founder, you can't just ignore one variable because one of 50 would just make would give you a bad part. So we were taught and we were familiar with systems thinking and the fact that you had to have a comprehensive it had to be comprehensive. You couldn't just choose something and say, well, that'll work, because it just wouldn't. So in one of my forays that was out of the Santa Fe Institute, a friend of mine introduced me to chaos theory. And I thought that was rather interesting that you had to take an organization to the kind of the brink of chaos sorted out, which is akin to metallurgy. You get your properties shifted over when you get up to a critical point and the molecules and the particle begin to shift around and you change the properties, which doesn't happen when you're solid. It only happens in this semi excited state when it's a little bit chaotic and they can rearrange themselves. So sitting during one of these lectures out there, the man next to me mumbled something about, well, this is all warmed over Elliot Jakes. And I thought, this is who's Elliot jakes. I asked him and he said, oh, he's a social researcher. I said, well, what do you have to do with him? He said, well, what do you do? He said, Well, I'm a consultant. My name is Mark Van Cleef. And I said, yeah, well, what do you consult? He said, Well, I management consultant. I consult with the largest 100 companies. I said, what do you do? He said, well, they've always got problems. And they call me in, I analyze it and I fix it, and they pay me money. I said, well, are you busy? He said, I'm always busy. I said, what does Jake's have to do? He said, Well, I use his system to analyze the problems and that's what I apply. And I thought to myself, well, I'm going to have to look into this. This sounds really interesting. So I got back and he had given me the name of the book and I read it. And I had at some point, because it's not easy reading, so I began to look at it, read the book and try to understand the principles. And one thing that hit me was on my own and this happens. I think any manager can relate to this. You find things as you run business that work, this works, that works, that works. And when you finally understand Jake's system, you'll find a lot of things that you find work actually fit right into his system. And the problem is, you've only got a third of the animal, you don't have the other two thirds. And what you find is once you have that whole system in place, it's just like for our standpoint, a foundry, where you can't just take the 20 key issue, the fundamentals in his system, and cherry pick them. You've got to put them all. And once you get them all working and in place, it has a dynamic effect on your organization, on the people and the motivation and how you think at work. And it is in fact a very effective and has to be used as a system, which kind of resonated with me. So at some point I said, Well, I need to talk to Elliot. So I called up their Stewart Institute, having bought their stuff, and read it and tried to apply it on my own, like everything, you were only trying to cherry pick it. But I had something like a time frame of management. I wanted my managers to be thinking ahead, and the ones you're most valuable were thinking and planning. And one of my managers said, Art, I want to tell you how bad it is around here. He said, I've got guys who all when you talk to them, they're telling you they're thinking about what happened last year or last week. And the idea of thinking ahead really isn't in their head. It really isn't part of the way they think. So I already had something called The Time Frame of Management, where I wanted people to think out earlier. So when I found this in Jake's work, much more carefully defined and scientifically proven out, I thought, this makes to me at least a lot of sense. So I called him up and he graciously agreed to see me for about 15 minutes. So I drove up to Gloucester and went to his house and he sat down and we started to talk at about ten in the morning. And we weren't finished by 16.