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There has never been a greater need to use
Systems Thinking in your enterprise. With the global financial
crisis, we are in a critical time for governments and businesses.
This environment severely challenges the assumptions underpinning
the way we manage our organisations. We can no longer afford
to run our businesses to make short-term profits or run our
public services to win elections.
Systems Thinking presents an opportunity and a range of methods
to focus on sustainability and purpose, and our responsibility
to society and the planet. It is an effective means of bringing
people together to find better and better ways of managing
all that we do and every service we provide; a way that gives
fresh perspective but based on well-grounded theories.
Systems Thinking Consortium
PRISM is a partner in the Systems Thinking Consortium, a
group of committed Systems Thinkers that presents a holistic
and integrated approach to improvement. It starts with your
specific issues, explores all critical angles, and applies
the whole range of Systems Thinking to enable you to design
solutions that deliver real, sustainable and measurable benefits
for your organisation.
This links together the well-proven approach to improvement
presented in the
PRISM Improvement Experience with the powerful and sophisticated
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) as a key element of our systemic
approach.
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)
SSM has its emphasis on purpose, and emphasises the distinction
between 'WHAT' an organisation does and 'HOW" it does
it. Change is always impacting on how an organisation does
what it does, but the purpose of an organisation tends to
have greater longevity than its processes and the way it organises
itself internally. Purpose is thus a more stable factor which
can help us understand & determine how an organisation
needs to adapt effectively to all relevant change. It also
provides a context for evaluating the effectiveness of potential
changes. Establishing a common understanding of purpose is
a key element of a proper Systems Thinking approach.
SSM also recognises that, alongside the visible organisation,
is a system of human activity which contains a variety of
perceptions amongst legitimate stakeholders about what makes
a situation problematic, or what constitutes improvement.
SSM accommodates the existence of these multiple perceptions
about the problem situation, and indeed the generally multiple
personal perceptions amongst those with an interest in the
enterprise about the organisation's 'purpose'. This variable
is a feature of all organisation-based problem situations
and SSM is the only approach to business analysis that we
are aware of that makes intentional use of "perceptions"
in a way that is totally explicit and defensible.
SSM systematically creates a model of the situation faced
by an organisation which enables a consensus on the true nature
of the issues, broad agreement on the true purpose of the
enterprise and thus new understanding of what needs to be
done effectively to deliver.
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