Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Rachana Shah explores system stability and points of intervention in a specific, highly complex system: the New York City Waste system. Shah uses systems theory to analyze specific actors and their actions to reveal key leverage points for change within the system. She prioritizes the leverage points by their potential for impact on the system, elucidating exactly what each leverage point can change, who will be affected by the change, and what effect the change could have on the system. She then explores the negative feedback processes that resist systems change, pointing out that the higher in impact a leverage point is, the more a system will resist it. Shah’s analysis demonstrates how actors can decompose a system into subsystems, identify key change points, and prioritize each change point by balancing its potential for impact against its potential to generate negative feedback from the system that cancels out the impact of the leverage point. Her focus on actors and their actions raises a valuable point for systems analysis. The way you analyze a system influences what you believe to be the key leverage points in the system and influences the effectiveness of systems change strategies built from that analysis. Conceptualizing the waste system as actors and actions highlights leverage points related to actors themselves. However, this way of viewing the system may obscure system processes and leverage points not related to actors, such as technological leverage points around material production and distribution or biophysical leverage points around waste decomposition.

The authors argue that systems are designed to produce their results, even when their results are far from perfect. Systems also have internal “negative feedback processes” that maintain system stability by canceling out disruptions. Overcoming these stabilizing systems can be challenging, and pushing a system far enough to initiate change can result in sudden, highly disruptive shifts to a new system. Rather than cause such disruptive change, the authors advocate for incremental shifts to avoid the kind of wholesale disruption that could leave financial, social, and political systems in shambles.

The authors examine the beliefs driving the dominant capitalist and democratic systems that govern the West. They believe we need to change the way we think to imagine a future where all life flourishes. For them, social transformation must be at the scale of previous transformations like the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Accomplishing this will require change across many social systems, but the authors target one in particular: MBA programs. The authors opine that business schools must ground MBA programs in the liberal arts and science traditions of the great medieval universities while challenging students to approach their work as a calling and using organizational methods and resources to create values-driven, society-scale change.

John R. Ehrenfeld looks to the present model of the brain, in which fundamental rationality is taken for granted, and asks if the answer to the need for systems change lies in the ways the human brain works. This argument raises provocative and (perhaps) discouraging implications. If our economic, social, and political systems reflect the biological structure and function of the brain, what is the potential for changing those systems? Does systems change require fundamental change to cognition, and, if yes, how might that be accomplished? What are the ethical implications of equating systems outside the body with systems inside the body, given the apparent diversity of human thought and behavior? Do we risk valuing one way of thinking over others? If yes, will the privileged group occupying positions of political power decide system structure and function?

This first of two Amplify issues probes the necessary scope and scale of systemic solutions. What does systems change mean? What systems need to change, and how? Which possible future world do we want, which do we need? How can markets deliver such change?

The authors conclude this issue of Amplify by analyzing systems for governing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in markets in the US. They argue that public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to fill the void in market governance left by the failure of the government to enact comprehensive climate change legislation. The authors highlight the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as a tool that provides companies and other organizations with the means to make specific, credible plans to achieve decarbonization. They argue that aligning PPPs with SBTi target setting would be an effective mechanism to accelerate carbon emissions reductions.

When looking at the characteristics of both the Industrial Revolution and the new knowledge revolution, there is a synergy between them that is critical to helping us understand how to reconcile them.

The elusive question, “Are we doing enough?” is the one we ask privately and quietly when reflecting on our progress toward workplace inclusivity. We ask this question among ourselves and feel somewhat reassured that no one else quite knows the answer either. However, bigger questions remain: Why are the achievements of diversity, equity, and inclusion always somewhere in the future? Why are they always “bonuses” beyond profitability, sustain­ability, and achievement of an organization’s mission?