Systems Thinking in My Neighborhood

• Welcome to a Dialogue on Whole-Scale™ Change with Kathleen Dannemiller by John Grohol, 11/14/97
  • Whole-scale change dialogue by Kathleen Dannemiller, 11/14/97
    
    

My only VERY loosely related experience is in working with several U.S. ethnic groups and with colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry for many years. In the 1970s I collaborated with Edward Roberts of the MIT System Dynamics group in the construction of computer models to study the impact of health and mental health policies. It was a great surprise to learn was how closely Ed's approach resembled the process of medical problem solving.

The thrust of system dynamics is to identify the most troubling symptomatic conditions and then to build a conceptual account of the system of time-varying forces that could produce and sustain those conditions. Physician's and especially dynamically oriented psychiatrists excel at this process and contributed greatly to the work.

However my colleagues were not able to apply that skill at all well in working within an organizational framework, this despite the fact that in their clinical work they were superbly sensitive to interpersonal relations. The interpersonal skills and systems thinking that were so effective in dyadic interactions did not carry over very well to the organizational context.

I have always wondered what inhibited the transfer (does sustained and disciplined attention to the dyad mitigate against it, in the way that years of doing fine needle work harms the vision of a skilled seamstress?) and what might be done to facilitate it.

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