A500.3.3.RB_CliffordMarc

On the morning of October 30th, 2017, I departed the Lake Charles airport in southwest Louisiana in an Agusta A109 helicopter on a routine flight to an oil platform located about 100 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.  As I climbed through 300 feet I attempted to retract the landing gear by raising the gear lever.  It was stuck; the gear lever would not move, and the landing gear would not go up.  I made the decision to return to the airport in order to have a company mechanic resolve the issue.

As the mechanic and I were trying to troubleshoot the issue we had a couple options.  We could inspect and test each component individually, including checking the gear lever itself to see if it was stuck or if there was an obstruction preventing it from moving.  We would need to check the hydraulic fluid level to ensure there was sufficient fluid for system operation and verify there were no leaks or binding hoses.  We would need to check the components of the landing gear themselves to ensure they were able to move freely and nothing was interfering.  This would be a long process requiring trial and error of many components.

The second option we had as we were troubleshooting the landing gear was to use our   knowledge of the system as a whole and isolate specific potential areas that could prevent normal function.  Using our knowledge of the landing gear system, the mechanic and I were able to quickly isolate the issue.  There is a switch, called the weight on wheels switch, which is attached to the main gear that prevents them from being retracted while the aircraft is on the ground.  We were quickly able to discover that the weight on wheels switch was not operating correctly and so it would not allow the gear to retract even when the aircraft was in flight.

Leaders have similar options when they oversee organizations.  Organizational leadership can be seen simply as a body of information, or it can be seen as a system of thinking.  Leaders who see the discipline of organizational leadership as simply a body of information make the mistake of not seeing the forest for the trees.  They are familiar with and can describe the parts, explain their need, their use, and how they should optimally function.  They expend a great deal of effort, energy, and resources inspecting each component, ensuring that it is doing its job, comparing what they are seeing with what they think should be happening. However, they focus excessively on each individual part, and fail to see the organization as a whole. One author wrote “it can be counterproductive to treat a complex dynamic social system like a simple machine” (Reed, 2006).

Effective leaders need to be able to see and think about the organizational system as a whole, and not simply a lumping of separate components.  Viewing the discipline of organizational leadership as a system of thinking entails understanding the logic of the field.  Nosich describes the logic of a field as “understanding parts as they fit together with one another and form a coherent whole: a logic” (2012).  It is important for effective leaders to have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the components of their organization, but that in itself is wholly insufficient.  Nosich stated “Practitioners in a field—at whatever level of education—do not simply possess information.  Rather, they know how to use that information as well as concepts that structure it” (2012).  Systems thinking has been described as “a discipline for seeing wholes.  It is a framework for seeing inter-relationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots” (Institute for Systemic Leadership, 2017).  Systems thinking has alternately been described as a tendency “to see things in terms of loops and patterns aided by constant assessment of what is happening, rather than flow charts and reliance on what should be happening” (Reed, 2006).  Seeing organizational leadership as a system means understanding the organization as a whole, not just knowing about, and being familiar with each individual component and its intended function.   It means knowing how an adjustment in one area will affect other areas, and then monitoring the system to see how the change actually affected the other areas.  It involves understanding how the different pieces are interconnected and interrelated.  “Recognizing the pattern of a system over time is a higher order level of thinking” (Reed, 2006), it takes more effort, more understanding, and a different point of view than seeing organizational leadership as a body of information.

In order for me to become a practitioner in the field (Nosich, 2012) it is important for me to understand the difference between organizational leadership as a body of information and organizational leadership as a system of thinking.  Seeing organizational leadership as merely a body of information would be like learning the details about the landing gear lever, its size, shape, function, and use, but not understanding how it interacts with other component of the system to lower and raise the landing gear.  As Reed stated “If not well considered—and sometimes even when they are—today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems” (2006).




References:

Nosich, G. M. (2012) Learning to think things through: A guide to critical thinking across the curriculum (4th edition). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Reed, G. E. (2006). Leadership and systems thinking. Defense AT&L, 10-14. Retrieved from http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dau/ree_mj06.pdf

The Institute for Systemic Leadership. (2017).The historical link between systems thinking and leadership. Retrieved from http://www.systemicleadershipinstitute.org/systemic-leadership/theories/the-historic-link-between-systems-thinking-and-leadership/