Anyone who has tried to change an organisation knows the moment when the plan meets the people. Diagrams that looked complete turn out to have left out the most important thing: that every part of the system is also a person with their own reading of what is happening.
Systems thinking helps. It shows how outcomes emerge from structure rather than from individual intention. But it can also tempt us into a fantasy of control — as if, with the right model, a human system could be steered like a machine.
Designing for agency, not compliance
The more promising approach, I suspect, is to design systems that increase the judgement of the people inside them rather than replace it. That is slower, and harder to measure. It is also the only kind of change I have seen last.
This connects my professional work in systems architecture with the questions in The Architecture of Personal Agency.
Filed underHuman Systems
