A500.3.3.RB - Organizational Leadership as a System

Organizational Leadership as a Body of Knowledge versus a System of Thinking

When viewing organizational leadership through the concept of a body of knowledge, we are looking at issues at a small or micro level as compared to viewing issues from a larger macro view. That’s to say, when using a body of knowledge to solve problems, we look at only those factors that may have a direct bearing on the issue. We tend to break things down into smaller components to determine why something is—or is not—working as expected. While such methods are useful, they do not allow leaders to see the larger issues that may be seen through a systems thinking approach.

If we think of organizational leadership as a body of knowledge, we may view it simply as facts, data, and information. It may limit our decision making to facts and data confined to one area or lead us to a less than optimal answer and perhaps miss opportunities to develop other solutions. On the other hand, if we think of organizational leadership as a system of thinking, we view multiple sets of facts, data, and information from more than one area and attempt to understand the effects each area has on the other one. Say, for example, we’re faced with an issue involving an employee’s substandard work performance as evidenced by multiple errors. If we consider only the information in front of us, we may incorrectly conclude that the individual does not have the aptitude to perform their assigned tasks. Using information we mistakenly believe to be true is known as activated ignorance (Paul & Elder, 2014, p. 354). On the other hand, if we consider other issues beyond the evidence--substandard work, we may find a very different matter, such as deficient training, to be the cause of the employee’s errors. Since the training was deficient, and we understand its detrimental effects, we can act on it to help correct the training process, retrain the employee to improve their performance, and add value to company performance. This is showing activated knowledge (Paul & Elder, 2014a, pp. 354-355). So, in this example, training affects employee performance and providing feedback of substandard employee performance affects training.

Systems thinking is understanding how different processes affect one another, their interconnectedness. Body-of-knowledge thinking views processes separately and without regard to how they interact with other processes. When organizational leadership is viewed as a system of thinking, leaders evaluate the different systems and their effects on the question at issue to reach a reasonable conclusion (Nosich, 2012, p. 188). When completing a series of courses while working towards a degree, we can view each course as a stand-alone entity and move on to the next course until we complete the series and obtain our degrees. Or, we can view each course as a system and use our new understanding to understand its effects on the next course. Leadership studies is not an end unto itself but rather a system to help us understand the interconnectedness of yet other systems such as project management.

References

Nosich, G. M. (2012). Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2014). Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.