The Stubborn, Brilliant Organizational System
“Pull a thread here, and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.” ~Nadeem Aslam
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the father of Chaos Theory, first discovered the butterfly effect in 1972. He showed us how the flap of a butterfly's wings could ultimately impact something as large as a tornado’s speed and trajectory or prevent it from happening altogether thousands of miles away. Small causes have big effects. This idea has expanded beyond the field of mathematics and into the functioning of organizational systems, and any complex and unpredictable system, for that matter.
When leaders decide to embark on the journey of building an enduring organization, they start a process that takes time, patience, and cultivation. They must trust science enough to suppress the basic human need to see the effect materialize quickly after the cause. That’s why this work is reserved for leaders looking to play the long game—to build organizations that will thrive years after they are gone.
More frequently, the media covers organizational scandals predicated on toxic culture and poor leadership. Rarely do we hear about the organizations that thrive and connect that to a systematic overhaul of the culture driven by teams of leaders. But not all is lost. We can use what’s been popularized by the media about the negative impacts of leader behavior and toxic culture to improve our understanding of the general nature of systems. This model gives us everything we need to lift up the leaders who cultivate healthy, self-sustaining growth systems. Systems, toxic or healthy, work the same way.
The problems leaders face rarely result from external forces. Oftentimes, however, external forces get blamed for convoluted problems that limit an organization’s sustainable growth. Typically, problems originate inside the organization. An ineffective manager will nearly always gravitate to a poorly-considered, short-term solution. Or use people as the scapegoat—we have a people problem. We call this the band-aid solution. The bleeding may stop, but both of these approaches further convolute the true problem. It is easier to slap a bandage on a problem rather than investigate the underlying issue and methodically solve it.
Short-term solutions may temporarily fix issues. But like the butterfly effect, the input of a poorly-considered, temporary solution creates a ripple in the system’s behavior. Because of feedback delays within the system, we don’t know that the problems are growing immediately. But that solution that seemed to fix the issue only perpetuates the core problem, reinforces other existing problems, or introduces entirely new problems to deal with down the road. This creates an organization in chaos, a tangled mess exceedingly more challenging to fix.
The toxic organization, as a self-maintaining system, maintains a state of internal disorder. The self-preservation mode and evolutionary behavior of systems can keep any organization—healthy or toxic—afloat even through the most significant internal strife. But when outside disruptions threaten a toxic organization—competition, economic downturns, environmental crises, and societal shifts—the organization is incapable of responding effectively. Rather, it responds in a way characteristic of its internal self. Over time, the outside experience reflects what happens inside the organization. If chaos exists internally, clients will feel that chaos. If executives micromanage, stoke fears, and suppress the voices of their teams, eventually, team members will disengage. While great leaders change the system, ineffective or toxic executives change people. Disengagement manifests in different forms—poor client management, withholding critical insight, and absenteeism, just to name a few.
Now let’s use what we know about devolving, declining, toxic organizations, and let’s reverse the effect. Remember, systems, toxic or healthy, work in exactly the same way. What you put in is what you get out.
A complex, self-sustaining system does resist isolated attempts to change it. And leaders can’t control or plan for every contingency. Organizations, as systems, have innumerable internal elements that can influence team member behavior—leader actions and decisions, goals, budgets, procedures, measurements, technology, and policies, just to name a few. The enduring organization system focuses solely on leader behavior, positing that a leader’s actions and decisions can shape all the other elements. We know that when the right leader behavior flows into the system, it indirectly but inevitably impacts the outflows of the system. That’s how we know it’s possible to painstakingly untangle the broken organization and start to rebuild a healthy one. A single leader engaging in the right behaviors to fix a toxic culture is much like the butterfly effect. Eventually, somewhere down the road, that inflow into the system will start to change it, untangle it. It will take time, but the change will start to happen.
Now think about what would happen if every leader adopted this mindset. How much more quickly could they untangle a broken organization and rebuild an enduring one?
