Hopefully you see that implementing a mutual benefit philosophy in your organization is not something you can do overnight, but has many benefits that make it worth the extra effort.  Now that you understand how you, your system and other systems in your organization work together, it is necessary to identify how your company fits into the greater whole which you are embedded in.  That’s right! In the last post we discussed fitting into the whole, meaning all the other systems that make up your company.  Now you must go beyond your company and identify how you fit with your vendors, your customers, the communities your employees live and of course the environment.

Once you understand your  system and your companies systems, you must now identify how you fit in the greater whole.  The issue you will face at this step, the other systems outside your company that make up the greater whole have probably not gone through the process you have.  Following are some best practices you can use to complete your system theory process:

1. understand how your company impacts the outside systems (customers, vendors, environment)
2. identify any components in outside systems that cause issues in your company
3. realize that it may be impossible for all systems to maximize efficiency.  It is important that you make it known to the outside system causing your inefficiencies that you have identified this issues (price so low you can’t make a profit)
4. decide which inefficiencies are acceptable and how they will benefit all the systems as a whole and change the ones that need to be changed
5. modify your company to handle the identified efficiency and accepted inefficiencies, or change what is causing the inefficiency

Remember, don’t let the word system as a way of describing the people and processes in a company lead you to believe this is a cold and calculated process.  It is anything but that.  We use this word because it could be a person, automated process, or outsourced process.  If thinking you are just one system in a group of systems that make up the whole disturbs you, then you need to look around you and realize that everything is just a series of systems interacting with other systems

I have noticed that over the past 30 years, computer programmers have gotten away from documenting their applications.  This is leading to a, launch it and fix the issues as they come up attitude.  It appears to be happening with entrepreneurs as well.  They seem to reacting to issues and then trying to fix them one at a time, instead of looking for the root cause and then fixing real problem.

As automation changes our business environment and the millennial’s become our workforce, it is more important that ever to make sure every component and every system works together for the betterment of the greater whole.