Organization System Archetypes
By definition, the system archetypes are patterns of behavior. As effective analytical tools, they help get insight into the essential structures that develop behavior and discrete events. These archetypes help managers identify recurring behavior that is already present in the organization and have future intended consequences. They are referred to as generic structures or classical system stories and usually leads to negative consequences. Peter Senge, in his book: The fourth Discipline: The Art of Learning Organization (2010), claims that there are systems archetype that exists in an organization though managers rarely notice them, their awareness is critical in management.
As indicated by Senge (2010), there are eight popular system archetypes. They include escalation, limits to grow, shifting the burden, drifting goals, growth and underinvestment, success to the successful, fixes that fail, and tragedy of the commons. In my work experience as a customer care representative, I experienced some of these archetypes. Therefore, the most common system’s archetypes present in my daily work life include growth and underinvestment, success to the successful, and shifting the burden.
Growth and Underinvestment
In this type of archetype, companies are viewed as causalities of the sigmoid curve (Braun, 2002). For an organization to lift the limit on development, it needs to undertake ways of limiting extensions. Notwithstanding, Senge argues that the right way of the investment requires to push back the drive to contribute. Therefore’ the investment must be forceful and fast enough to hinder decreased development”. As suggested by Mella (2012), an organization discovers the ways of underperforming by lowering the performance measurements.
Braun (2002) affirms that growth and underinvestment are evident in retail stores whenever new products are introduced; the customers first enter the learning phase. Those who come early buy the products very fast as the shop makes more effort to add more stock. However, soon the product enters the growth phase, and the demand for the product begins to rise, resulting in high sales. This leads to continuous restocking, which translates to growth and investment. However, as competition stiffens, the demand for the product falls, leading to reduced sales. The managers start putting less effort into investment and concentrate on the ones with high demand. They fail to notice the rise in demand and continue under-investing. The lesson for managers to learn here is, “If there is a real potential for development, fabricate limit ahead of time of interest, as a system for making a request.” The vision for development should be calculated by improving the business’s performance standards to solve underperformance.
Shifting the Burden
Shifting the burden is about how a problem makes us come up with a quick fix (Senge, 2010).In such a case, we concentrate on an urgent, symptomatic solution instead of generating more fundamental solutions. This archetype will start with an asymptomatic problem that triggers us to intervene and solve. For a while, we try symptomatic solutions that don’t seem to ease the problem. After trying several asymptomatic solutions, the issues simplifies, and then we feel we don’t need complex and time-consuming fundamental solutions. The asymptomatic solutions’ side effects affect how we implement a fundamental solution (Mella, 2012). It requires a lot of time and effort for the fundamental solution to solve the problem where it originates from, and this makes the problem recur. Unfortunately, when there is the continuous use of the asymptomatic solution, side effects become more excellent and more significant when reinforcing the process, thus reducing our capability to implement the fundamental solution.
We normally experience this type of archetypes in my current work station. Inexperienced supervisors are often assigned to lead a project task, which results in mistakes that annoy clients. When this happens, the senior managers step in to resolve the mistakes while criticizing the supervisors for their errors. Every time the mistake is made, they rush to senior management to make things right. Then the mistakes lead to a behavior where the supervisor reaches out to the senior management whenever he/she has a problem. This makes company issues becoming a drag on the senior management team members who are always invited to resolves even small issues. We solve this by ensuring that supervisors are adequately trained and mentored to allow them to resolve the problems on their own.
Success to the Successful
Braun (2002) describes this archetype as a reward for exemplary performance by allocating more organizational resources to improve performance. The organizational belief is that successful employees get their resources allocated to them based on past performance. In this case, the reward of success is a motivator for the actions to continue winning, even if it is harmful. This is reinforcing feedback when success creates motivation to continue to gain the reward. This pushes new players out of the system and can mean runaway success for the best players. The more successful one gets, the easier it is to get more resources and harder it is for others to access the resources.
In my workplace, we experience this archetype in fashion, coupled with the fact that people love to go for affordable clothes. Since our customers tend to replace their existing clothes, our retail shop is motivated to continue producing affordable clothing at whatever cost. The rewards of increased sales and profits motivate the company to continue allocating resources to the business as usual. Solving the success of the successful system archetype is not an easy task because it requires the presence of resources. In the real economy, the resources seem scarce, and there is always opportunity cost (Senge, 2010). However, we can minimize or solve this type of archetype by ensuring that all projects have the necessary resources and priorities well defined before being launched. Their contingency resources should be set aside to prevent them from competing for similar resources.
In conclusion, systems archetypes can be essential in planning. A set of procedures can be tried through the archetype to identify the potential challenges and allocate them the planning stage where they are easy to handle. Besides, systems archetypes provide a dialect that conveys how a particular framework is relied upon to perform. Unintended results from systems archetypes are plainly understood and can be translated into potential or acknowledged outcomes. Having a dialect to document, impart, and break down practices gives a helpful and critical framework for managing changes essential to wipe out negative behavioral examples. Once individuals from an organization face a particular archetypes system, their insight can be utilized to assemble a stable system that is less prone to their challenges.
References
Braun, W. (2002). The system archetypes. System, 2002, 27.
Mella, P. (2012). Systems thinking: Intelligence in action. Milan: Springer.
Senge, P. M. (2010). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Broadway Books.