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The impact in in innovating the Systems, not just making another thing
I use a word in a conversation last week that I hadn’t dug up in a while. And I figured it’s time to resurrect it.
Systempreneurship.
We know what entrepreneurship is — it’s starting something new. A new product, a new business, a new program. It’s sparkly. It’s exciting. It’s new. And that’s why we fall in love with it, why we work and fight for it, why we sweat over it. The potential, the possibility entices. And when it holds out the promise of making our lives on this earth better, it’s hard not to fall for its allure.
Systems, on the other hand, aren’t so exciting. The very word falls with a thud. We think of systems as the background, the plumbing, the stuff that lays the foundation for the good stuff being able to happen. Necessary, but dull.
And partly because they’re typically dull, and partly because they’re typically in the background, under the plasterboard, we are really good at not seeing them. At taking them for granted. Unless something catastrophically breaks and that system starts leaking through the sealing or swallows a car in a sinkhole, systems get little of our attention.
But as we move from the Industrial Era we’ve all known, into a new technological and social epoch, those systems that we’ve learned to ignore are causing us more and more problems.
We can see that most easily in the kinds of examples that I used above, but they’re a little misleading. Most of that kind of system failure is caused by aging and entropy - pipes rust and leak, tree branches fall on power lines, a hundred years of water and gravity makes the old coal mine cave in. But the most difficult to see - and to fix - are where the old system still does its job, but the job it does doesn’t fit what we need anymore.
Those are the kinds of systems we face most often. These are the systems that force our employees to do time cards when we will pay them the same regardless, that make getting reimbursed for spending personal money on the business a misery, that make the civic-minded among us sit for hours on hard wooden chairs to speak for a frantic three minutes at a city council meeting.
Because they’re the systems that the Industrial Era largely created, they’re systems designed to control, to command. To force compliance. To quietly reinforce hierarchy. But as technology and cultural norms make so many hierarchies and controls seem antique, or increasingly difficult to maintain, those systems stop having the benefits they used to.
These are systems designed for other people, living with another set of assumptions, in another time. Not this one. And because they don’t fit, they rub on us like a badly-placed seam, chafing.
No wonder we’re angry so often.
We stick with our old systems in part because we don’t see them, and in part because when we do see them, we take them as a given.
But none of it is a given.
We need to practice systempreneurship across our businesses, our communities and our lives. We need to develop a skill that our ancestors never had - the skill of mentally taking apart and re-assembling the systems behind the walls of our organizations.
Because chances are they’re not helping us succeed, either now or as we move into the future. And they’re not going to start helping…any more than a rusted pipe is going to fix itself.