We cover:
Practical, in-the-trenches effects of systems thinking from the building level to the bid level
Environments that are conducive to systems thinking
Strengths and challenges of systems thinking
Here is our conversation.
Stephanie: What was it like to work at a company where systems thinking was part of the culture? How was it different from other places you'd worked before? Had systems thinking arisen organically there, or had someone championed it?
Mark: My only exposure to systems thinking prior to work was three courses related to control systems I had taken as an undergrad. Most of my subsequent work, at least when I stayed close to engineering controls, built upon the same principles in some graduate work. Basically, assess something complex, build a simplified model, and try to demonstrate a control system that could manage it effectively and predictably. The school taught it as a mathematical model straight up. The closest thing to the human element was arbitrary constants for the range of delay of human responses. It was completely divorced from the people part of things.
I can only conclude that at SAIC, where I got my first great introduction to systems thinking, it was set in the culture. One theory I would propose is SAIC typically did not make products even if the opportunity was there. So, while it was loaded with MS and PhD scientists, fully bought into system thinking, they didn’t make stuff. The product was IP (intellectual property), so repeatability and predictability of profit needed systems that could create some predictability around complexity. I don’t know how it came to be, but it was clearly encouraged in many ways.
Stephanie: Can you give some examples of how systems thinking was implemented in practice?
Mark: I think these will be a mixture of insightful and funny.
As background, the company was birthed in Southern California in La Jolla. Because they didn’t make stuff, it was a bit of a think tank. The management concluded (presumably with data) that having too many people under one roof was counter to productivity. They rapidly adopted a standard building, and it was highly unusual for there to be more than 200 people in a division. Too many faces, loss of cohesiveness.
I worked chiefly out of a building in Huntsville, Alabama, near the Marshall Space Flight Center. After I saw the headquarters, the satellite buildings, and occasionally traveled to DC, I realized the buildings were largely the same! For example, HQ and some other buildings had specialized components called snubbers which isolate key equipment in an earthquake. The funny part was you could note some dead space in the footprint where this type of equipment was unnecessary in buildings in non-earthquake zones, which at first blush seems unnecessary. But there were a lot of system outcomes I never appreciated in the beginning around standard buildings:
I am confident that post-9/11 awareness of redundancies in key buildings would be very easy to accommodate in those buildings even today. There was almost strange attention to what-ifs for utilities and isolation.
There were key functions they wanted in all buildings and divisions like security, oversight, and document management. Standardization meant key values always existed at every division, and it was consistent. Those qualities were expressed in every single division regardless of the vertical industries they might be serving. For a short period before working there, I had spent some time at an integrated defense firm. While some elements were present, never with the same consistency I saw at SAIC.
The bigger result which I now appreciate is the buildings respected how humans interact: (1) open entry; (2) no security delays; (3) stairs mostly and you came to recognize everyone. It was difficult if not impossible for a division to lose its mission and focus. While not exactly system thinking, what I also remember was an incredible tolerance for different people and different styles of thinking. We had English majors, former math professors, et al. The leader of the facility was a brilliant man, a great listener, and when he spoke it was worth listening to. In hindsight, the serious commitment to no bureaucracy was smart, as was a belief that too many people [in one building] meant a loss of culture and effectiveness. There were stories told within the firm that if a division got too large, it would be split.
Lots of the work was to serve the government and regulated business work. Almost always fixed bids, so it was critical to carefully establish scope to ensure profit. In the sector I supported, our contractual specialists evaluated and scored the possible customers based upon a statistical model. Since our targets were investor-owned utilities, we gathered public data, knew how long it took them to build their facility, how many employees they had, and what their performance had been like since going operational. I thought it ridiculous in the early days but quickly realized it gave us the knowledge of who were “bad” customers (or at least ill-prepared) and would be unlikely to be a predictable profit.
Regardless of the customer, we were systematic in our approach to how we evaluated RFQ (Request for Quote). The proposals were methodically stripped into sentences, and those sentences were mapped into a list of requirements. This would allow us to have a RTM (Requirements Traceability Matrix) and a comprehensive view of what we were building and what was required and what was in conflict and what was non-compliant in our response. When I think of the primitive nature of our information tools relative to today, I realize such a thing has always been possible but ignored by many organizations.
Although I repeat myself, 25 years later I was exposed to the philosophy of the corporation W.L. Gore & Associates and serviced them as a customer in a different business. They had the same philosophy regarding buildings and the number of people under one roof, and it had allowed them to thrive as a conglomerate and participate in an absurd number of unrelated industries. I asked one of the principals, and they were familiar with the concept and SAIC. There have been many business-school studies about Gore, which makes Gore-Tex among other products.
Stephanie: What were the strengths and weaknesses of systems thinking, in your experience (e.g., was it more useful for some types of projects than others)?
Mark: I think the extra layer of evaluation might not be that helpful in a quick-responding world. It was difficult to be competitive in smaller contracts as there was overhead associated with standard practices.
A very successful hardware product was a system still installed at the southern border called VACIS. It is a high-speed scan device for tractor-trailers. The product was fantastic. It was right for the market. However, it led to a philosophy change of partnering rather than carefully isolating IP. The firm worked collaboratively on the hardware and I believe lost some repeatability. Just my opinion.
I can provide one last example of the consequence of system thinking. Long after my involvement, I was in contact with an old friend shortly after 9/11. For many years, the firm had administered a long-term contract with the government as part of catastrophic disaster recovery. Within two hours after the first tower fell, an emergency cell network was established in Lower Manhattan compliments of SAIC. These sorts of things—disaster recovery planning, logistics, and consolidated threat assessment—can only happen if it is valued and is systematic.
Stephanie: Why do you think systems thinking thrived in your organization?
Mark: I think the competitors were largely fully integrated defense firms, while we were satisfied with IP only. While I don’t know whether it is true, I believe for many years SAIC was the single largest US Government contractor measured by the number of contracts and just large and diverse. Nevertheless, completely out of the limelight and stuck to its knitting.
Stephanie: What were some of the biggest challenges you navigated while using systems thinking at work?
Mark: The firm was so vested in its approach and the independence of Divisions, at least two times while working there may have been four vendors bidding for a major contract and two separate Divisions of SAIC were bidding against each other! The company encouraged internal competition, and at first blush, it does not seem sensible. It often led to grudging cooperation.
At times, with time pressures, following systematic processes for contract bidding was time-consuming. I came to believe in it, but in the early days, it was ridiculous. We were early adopters of DEC computers. For systematic breakdown, we used their word processor called RUNOFF. We would strip hundreds of pages of documents into sentences and then manually map them to requirements. We rarely missed details, and in a fixed-bid world, it was brilliant but a pain in the butt.
Stephanie: What advice would you give to other people who'd like to champion systems thinking in their organizations?
Mark: While I am sure it can apply to all sorts of businesses, I think a fixed-bid performance-bond business that cannot be late is perfectly suited to a systematic thinking organization. One of my favored observations from the years there was we won a lot of business from competitors who misquoted and eventually defaulted. We were really good at that as we had been a bidder and we could confidently dust off our specifications and hit the ground running.
Stephanie: What advice would you give to someone who's starting a company or organization and would like to build in systems thinking from the get-go?
Mark: Be privately owned and create a structure that makes it impossible to distort even if it goes public. I believe when SAIC went public, it became more of a conglomerate and probably lost its identity. The company has since split into two entities, and it seems to me it has lost a lot of momentum. They are still a big player in the national security arena, but it is my opinion that when companies reorganize, merge, or split, the original culture is often lost or at least diluted.
Thank you Stephanie -- System thinking is not simple to explain -- at some level I think of it as a model of what we are looking at. I am sure, at times, that seems like an unnecessary abstraction and for lots of people hard to justify.
The amazing thing I've come to appreciate is that our eyes deceive us. When we go for the forest instead of the trees, a deeper understanding can become clearer and our view of what we are looking at comes into view. I appreciate your willingness to ask these questions. I have my doubts whether this will be interesting but I hope it can be helpful to someone.
I try very hard to limit my subscriptions to manage my time to ten or less. This one is WORTH READING every week because I always learn something!