Читать книгу Managing in a Complex World - Johannes Rüegg-Stürm - Страница 23

Manifold relationships, interdependencies, and feedback exist not only between an organization (as a complex value creation system) and its environment, but also among that organization’s elements. A systems-oriented view aims to understand the involved dynamics. It pursues this goal because, in a complex action context, impacts always result from the reciprocal interaction between different elements. This view focuses not on the properties of individual system elements but instead on the interdependence of interactions and the resulting and retroactive effects.

For instance, a good soccer team cannot simply be formed by buying a group of stars. What counts instead is the team’s well-drilled, creative interplay. This results not from individual skills, but represents a quality of its own. Of course, outstanding players may have an important function.

What a single player can achieve depends on the overall dynamic constellation, i.e., the two teams on the pitch. Interdependence means that every player simultaneously observes several players on his team and on the opposing team, and aligns his own behavior with this dynamic constellation. Since every player does this at the same time, the result is a highly complex behavioral structure. Just as we can understand this merely to some extent, we can derive no precise predictions from this structure. [36]

What a soccer team can achieve also depends on various factors: its embedding in its larger context, the club’s management and talent promotion scheme, the involvement of fan communities, the club’s participation in national and international soccer bodies, etc.

In a systems-oriented view, an organization’s impact and success (just like a soccer team’s) result from the interplay of manifold interdependent prerequisites, capabilities, and dynamics. Historically, these crystallize in organizational value creation – which sets narrow limits to an organization’s “simple controllability.” A system, as a dynamic whole (in a dynamic environment), is not only more than but also different from the sum of its parts – and precisely this makes a system so complex.