A Harvard Business Review blog post reminded me recently that all systems are designed to serve a purpose. The nuance of this statement is that an organization’s true purpose may not be its stated purpose. Instead, I’ve often discovered a less visible and unarticulated purpose – one that the system is designed to serve.
In the HBR post, author Lan Nguyen Chaplin shared her experience as a Vietnamese American woman pursuing tenure in higher education. In trying to achieve her academic goal, Chaplin discovered that that system wasn’t designed to help everyone thrive. Rather, this higher education institution was designed to help only some people thrive.
As a woman of color, Chaplin experienced microaggressions, double standards, and of course, bias. Like many other people of color in many other industries, she had to try to disrupt or “hack” the system- and its inherent discrimination – to succeed and become a tenured professor in academia. Her story is essentially about working against the system and the purpose it is currently serving.
Read Chaplin’s How to Disrupt a System That Was Built to Hold You Back.
When using the word “designed” I mean that I look for structures, processes, and behaviors that are encouraged, reinforced, and rewarded in a system. Nature is designed, for example, to create conditions conducive to the life of future generations. Everything in Nature leans toward supporting this purpose. The proof of this is that we have lived through five mass extinctions and there is still life on this planet. It may not be the same mix of life or species – dinosaurs are conspicuously missing – but life continues to regenerate and evolve. It is the system’s purpose.
Identifying the purpose a system is designed to serve
Leaders must learn how to uncover the actual purpose that the system is designed to serve. This helps determine the size of the gap between the desired outcome and the current state of the organizational system.
To influence change in an organization, every leader must understand clearly what the current system is designed to do.
There are different ways to observe and recognize the purpose the system is designed to serve. I like to observe what is currently happening and uncover the consistent outcomes of a department, division, or organization. There are some standard questions I use to help in this analysis as I work toward uncovering the real purpose a system is designed to serve. For example:
- Is the system consistently generating outcomes that no one really wants? Most people don’t want to work in a toxic or chaotic place. Yet when a toxic hierarchical organization is an outcome, the system is designed to reward and reinforce leadership that supports this purpose. When the true purpose – that often invisible, unstated purpose – is to promote ego-based leadership or narcissistic behavior, the system and all of its structures, processes, and behaviors will perpetuate a dysfunctional organization with often unbearable outcomes.
- What do the patterns embedded in the processes of an organization have to say? If control is a pattern underlying leadership expectations, for example, every financial accountability system, each job description, and all the human resources patterns will reflect that hidden purpose of maintaining control.
- Is there an overarching system outcome that has been around for decades, or even centuries? The U.S. economy is designed to enclose wealth and power. It extracts and exploits resources and people to achieve that end and the profits of the system are unequally distributed to those at the top of the system. This is not within every organization, thankfully. Our economy’s pattern has sustained over time, as wealth and power remain concentrated in an increasingly smaller group of people. This is a glaring example of a pattern that helps us uncover the true purpose the system is designed to produce.
Chaplin’s moving story and examples as diverse as Nature’s ecosystems and the US economy demonstrate the importance of identifying an organization’s or other system’s purpose. It is the beginning of the journey toward a more regenerative society and sets the foundation for perhaps the most important question of all:
If we designed a system with the purpose of social and ecological well-being for all, how would our processes, structures, and behaviors shift in our organizations and our society?
We will get there
Systems don’t have purposes. Human beings have purposes and design and invent systems to use and serve their (individual and common) purposes. It’s a cycle: …. —> individual purpose –> individual means –> common purposes (“systems”) —> common means —> individual purpose (of common means) –> … . What then emerges, is a a kind of “tragedy of the commons”: the common means used for individual purposes and individuals seen as “means”.
Interestingly, we use the same word (mean) to designate “nasty”, “common” and “average”. And for meaning. The system of language seems to have multiple purposes.