1.5 Understanding the Nature of the System in Organizations

Effective leader‑managers have a common affinity for understanding the nature of the larger system within which they work. Whenever they take on new job assignments, they make a special effort to understand the inner workings of the larger system of which their work unit is a part. Realizing that the needed information can not be uncovered simply from printed documents; they are relentless in their probing. They observe, inquire, and integrate until they are satisfied that they have a valid conceptual model of the system.

John Dewey, the philosopher and educator, was astute in his portrayal of the "good judge." This is a person "who has a sense of the relative indicative or signifying values of the various features of the perplexing situation; knows what to let go of as of no account; what to eliminate as irrelevant; what to retain as conducive to the outcome; what to emphasize as a clue to the difficulty." In essence, this is a person who has a profound understanding of the larger system within which he or she works.

In The Human Organization, Rensis Likert stresses that the manager should have a good grasp of two aspects of the system: the nature of the system and the state of the system. In this regard, he likens the manager's job to that of the physician:

A physician needs two different kinds of information to make a correct diagnosis. First, he must know a great deal about the nature of human beings. This knowledge is based on extensive research which relates symptoms to causes and measurements of body conditions to the health of the or­ganism, thereby revealing the character of the human body's normal and abnormal functioning. This knowledge gives the doctor insights into how the system ought to function, so that he can know what he needs to measure and how he needs to interpret the measurements. The second kind of information needed by the doctor to discover the patient's state of health at any particular time is that revealed by the appropriate measurements and tests made on that patient at that time.

It is generally understood that measurement of progress is dependent on accurately assessing the state of the system at any point in time. It also must be understood that accurately assessing the state of the system is dependent on understanding the nature of the system.