Transforming Systems – “Troubleshooting and Strategically Implementing Solutions”

One of the problems people have in walking into (or being the one who haphazardly built it) a business as an operational system, is the we’ve been hopelessly trained to the left-brain function which neatly separates a whole ecological system into singular parts, then studies and analyzes the function of each part in an attempt to figure out where the problem exists, then isolate it, and either correct or replace it. Doctors can tend to be really prone to this approach because they’ve often been taught to practice medicine in much the same way. However, this hardly ever works, and often doesn’t even produce a temporary relief of the imagined problem, because the system, which has been trained to behave as a whole, simply recreates the same problem with a new employee by training them to the same behaviors.

 If instead, we employ our right-brain ability to view everything in a holistic fashion as a living system that has numerous processes inherent within it that involve multiple people playing roles in a dynamic interaction that’s consistently producing an effect, we can recognize what process needs to be redeveloped because it’s not designed properly, or provide new methods and training processes that will enhance people’s ability to perform their part in a more proficient and congruent manner. Instead of looking at individuals, we need to look at processes and methods being employed, teams producing those processes, and departments within a larger process, and the entire nature and behaviors being displayed within that team who’s performing a dynamic process in an effort to produce a congruent and specific outcome.

Change has to be introduced at the right place in a whole process in order to serve to transform how the process performs. If diagnosed incorrectly, replacing or retraining the person deemed to be the problem; the system will simply shape the new person back into the same pattern and reproduce the same basic problem. You have to be able to accurately determine what part in the process is causing the dysfunction and correct it as a whole process; meaning change introduced at one point in an existing system will have a ripple effect as a synchronization of how it acts to systematically modify all other aspects of the same process. Problems are hardly ever the result of one person (unless they’re the owner or boss), but nearly always the result of the relationships that exist between multiple people who interact as apart of a whole dynamic.

 Likewise, when hiring new team members, you need to look at and take into consideration the team they will be apart of, what role they will play within that team, and what personality or natural tendencies will be best suited to enhance the performance of the whole team. Technical skills required for the job they usually bring to the table just through the job description or professional degree as the basic knowledge needed to perform the job, your job then becomes to pick the right personality that will fit into the team while providing them with the training necessary to perform at required standards, while giving them feedback from the very beginning that will serve to form the proper habits and rituals necessary to function proficiently right from the get go. Many put people through a standard training program that’s of poor quality, and let them go for a month or two (30-90 day probation period), allowing them to be poorly trained, then when problems naturally occur, get caught up in a form of damage control by trying to figure out what the problems are, without ever identifying that the acquisition and training process being used is the problem.

In other cases, I’ve seen people engage in endless turn-over at the lower ranks of the business, while incurring the same type of problem over and over, that eventually forms into a belief (you can’t find good employees), without ever recognizing that the problem is actually in the higher ranks, and is more of a trickle down effect, which is why they consistently recreate the same problems. The beliefs and paradigms of key people directly involved in the creation and maintenance of a business, act to consistently create and recreate the same type of realities by how they influence them through their daily interaction. They are also the ones who design, decide on, or willingly employ the processes and protocol that determine the daily operations from a developmental point of view, often without having the knowledge required to realize they have an inappropriate system because they adopted it from an expert or are using a conventional model for their profession laid out for them as a standardized method for operations. Yet any process employed in a specific situation with a specific group of people has to be customized to that situation in order to be truly creative. What works for one group of people in one situation may not work at all for another group in a similar situation. Cookie-cutter processes, taught in the same way across the board and delivered in a manual style, while they may provide a fundamental template to use as a guideline for redesigning and structuring a business model, are often meaningless, and even somewhat detrimental to individual Entrepreneurs running small businesses or Private Practices.

 The business model is designed to act as a paradigm for the business as a separate entity that serves to consistently create the reality of that business, just like our individual paradigms determine what and how we create as individuals within our own lives. So the business model has to be an offspring of the model psychologically employed by the owner and key people within the organization in order for them to be able to naturally work in a way that consistently creates the same type of idea on a larger scale through the business. The business acts as the pathway for delivery of the service being offered by the professionals within that business. If the models between the business entity and the individual clash or serve to contradict each other, the personal model of the individual will always win out, because it comes naturally to the individual in charge of creating the essence of the business itself through daily activity. It’s the overall process or methods being employed in any given situation that should be examined as a whole when any part of the system isn’t functioning properly. Otherwise there’s a tendency to simply use the same process to recreate the same problem using a new personality.

 Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher