The Good Oil by Rod Brown *
Professor Peter Senge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Arie De Gues (Chief Planner, Royal Dutch Shell) are pioneers of learning organisations and the application of systems thinking. They argue that an organisation’s only sustainable competitive advantage in a global economy is the superior performance of its people. They, and their supporters, have taken ‘scenario planning’ and ‘systems thinking’ to new levels to assist management in anticipating change in their environment.
At the core of this work has been the development of learning organisations. Their essential argument is that learning organisations allow you to get beyond the vision statement – by generating widespread, quality interactions that inspire people, stimulate innovation and deliver real results.
Professor Senge has described systems thinking as … “a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles – distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering and management”.
Systems thinking at the community level
The Senge – De Gues approach to systems thinking has symmetry at the community level because communities, like organisations, depend on people to make them tick. Moreover, in today’s complex world, there is a real need to better identify connections between cause and effect, and identify just what measurement tools should be used at each stage of development. Systems thinking also has the potential to provide pointers for improving resource allocation at both the macro and firm level.
Allied to the Senge thinking is the concept of x-efficiency; that is, the unknown factor that explains why two countries with outwardly similar capital and labour endowments can have such different economic outcomes. This is why societies with strong organisational and connective systems are better able to marshall their resources – Japan and Germany in the post-War period are held up as the examples.
Systems thinking is particularly relevant to community development because communities with strong social capital usually have systems thinking embedded in them. They are more likely to prosper in a globalised world where value chains, industry collaboration and fleet footed responses to market opportunities win the day – the other communities tend to stagnate.
The capital cities and regional centres have an edge in this regard, because it is easier for the stakeholders to keep in contact. For example, have you observed that Novocastrians have a fierce pride, and a supportive social structure utilising people like Jack Newton and Paul Harragon to keep Newcastle under notice? Smaller cities like Wagga Wagga, Shepparton, Ballarat and Geraldton seem, to me at least, to have similar ‘animal spirits’ operating to their benefit.
‘Seeing wholes’
Another relevant aspect is the difficulty all planners and policymakers face in ‘seeing wholes’, and then being able to do anything about this. This phenomenon is manifested in the city/rural divide, stop/start planning and project delays, and bandaid solutions to environmental degradation. There is surely a need for better tools in this area. Professor Frank Stilwell (University of Sydney) in fact argues that all public policies, ranging from tariff policy and industry policy to fiscal and monetary policies, have implicit urban and regional impacts – and therefore need to be coordinated and offset by the use of explicit spatial policies.
He also talks about spatial inertia in the context of cities – because of the time it takes to change housing stock, energy supply systems, environmental systems and so forth. His book, Changing Tack (Pluto Press, 2000), is quite thought provoking and worthy of your readership.
Stilwell’s line of thinking is understandably a long way from the policy priorities at present. However, Labor’s ideas man, Mark Latham (ex Mayor of Liverpool) proposed a Place Management Model in his book, Civilising Global Capital. He favours spatial policies and the devolution of functions and resources of large Federal and State departments to a local ‘place manager’, with the aim of addressing the problem of Government funding silos. He is intuitively arguing for a systems approach.
Local Government Minister, Wilson Tuckey, is a strong advocate of local action. Could he take a leaf out of Latham’s book (pages 216-219 actually) and explore the concept? After all, there is no intellectual property in politics!
Another tack might be to inject some systems thinking into the excellent ‘State of the Nation’ analysis prepared each year by the ALGA and National Economics.
It would stimulate fresh thinking into how we might achieve better balanced economic and social outcomes.
If you have an interest in this subject, please contact me, or Jim Bitomsky of Kleinhardt FGI Pty Ltd, Cairns, to whom I am indebted for his insights on learning organisations and systems thinking, on (07) 4041 1120 or jim@kleinhardt.com.au
* Rod Brown’s Canberra based consultancy group, Australian Project Developments Pty Ltd, specialises in industry/regional development and government liaison. For further information telephone (02) 6231 7261 or email apd@orac.net.au
