The Use of Open System Approach in Managing Change - Essay Example

The Use of Open System Approach in Managing Change Introduction: Increasingly, people recognise that organisations need to be not only efficient butalso adaptable and innovative. Organizations need to be prepared for uncertainty, for rapid changes in their environment, and for rapid, creative responses to these changes. The organic network emphasizes increased flexibility of the organizational structure, decentralized decision making, and autonomy for working groups or teams. Change is a naturally occurring phenomenon, simply a part of living. Changes are milestones in an organization; although some changes are anticipated, many changes are entirely unexpected and sometimes unwelcome. It is to be noted that many changes are exciting, leading to new opportunities and challenges. When these changes occur too rapidly or demand too much of the individuals passing through the process of change, they can make individuals very uncomfortable (Heward, Hutchins, and Keleher, 2007, 170-178). Everyone has own assumptions about how organizations work, developed through a combination of experience and education. The use of metaphor is an important way in which one expresses these assumptions. Some people talk about organizations as if they were machines. This metaphor leads to talk of organizational structures, job design and process reengineering. Others describe organizations as political systems. Researchers have works on organizational metaphors, which are good starting points for understanding the different beliefs and assumptions about change that exists. Metaphors are important in the sense that this provides opportunity to think and deepen the understanding. Deep understanding allows, in turn, seeing things in new ways and consequently acting in new ways. One such metaphor is seeing organizations like an organism. This metaphor of organizational life sees the organization as a living, adaptive system. This suggests, that different environments favour different species of organisations based on different methods of organising (Rowe and Hogarth, 2005, 396-405). When the organisation is conceived as a living, adaptive system, congruence with the environment is the key to success. According to this metaphor, in stable environments a more rigid bureaucratic organization would prosper. In more fluid, changing environments a looser, less structured type of organization would be more likely to survive. This metaphor represents the organization as an 'open system'. Organizations are seen as sets of interrelated sub-systems designed to balance the requirements of the environment with internal needs of groups and individuals. This approach implies that when designing organizations, we should always do this with the environment in mind. Emphasis is placed on scanning the environment, and developing a healthy adaptation to the outside world. Individual, group and organizational health and happiness are essential ingredients of this metaphor. The assumption is that if the social needs of individuals and groups in the organization are met, and the organization is well designed to meet the needs of the environment, there is more likelihood of healthy adaptive functioning of the whole system (Weiner, Amick, and Lee, 2008, 379-436). Thus it is apparent that there is no one best way to design or manage an organisation. Like in a organism, in such an organisation, the success of its functioning would depend on the transmission of information between different subsystems, and as has been mentioned earlier, the unhindered communication and exchange with the environment would determine its efficiency. Thus, as an organism, the homeostasis is the key. By homeostasis, it means the organisation would tend to maximise the fit between individual, team, and organisational needs. Therefore, it emerges that if one decides to manage the change in such an organisation, rather than using internal focus, changes are made only in response to changes in the external environment. The interaction between an organism and its environment is based largely on adaptive changes in response to the changing environment. Applying this metaphor into organisations, the individuals and groups in organisations need to be psychologically aware of the need for change in order to adapt. The response to a change in the environment can then be designed, and works can be initiated towards that. Strategically, participation and psychological support are the necessary strategies. Therefore, the open systems model assesses the degree of flexibility and external focus of an organisation. In this model, the two key roles are innovator and broker. The competencies or skills required in an open systems model for the role of an innovator are living with change, thinking creatively, and creating change. The competencies of the broker role are building and maintaining a power base, negotiating agreements and commitment, and presenting ideas. Thus, an organisation and its professionals that are effectively and successfully operating in its external environments meet the criteria of an open systems model. It has been argued that the idea of the organization as an adaptive system is flawed. The organization is not really just an adaptive unit, at the mercy of its environment. It can in reality shape the environment by collaborating with communities or with other organizations, or by initiating a new product or service that may change the environment in a significant way. In addition the idealized view of coherence and flow between functions and departments is often unrealistic. Sometimes different parts of the organization run independently, and do so for good reason. The resulting ideology says that individuals should be fully integrated with the organization. This means that work should be designed so that people can fulfill their personal needs through the organization, which is most often not the case (Taber, 2007, 541-554). There has been a considerable body of literature in this area which deals with the subject of open systems model in change management. Despite the limitations in this approach and criticisms, it would be better to critically review the literature to see whether application of this model would be worthwhile in managing change in clinical work place. The example of NHS change management literature can be sited here. This is a literature to present the important basic concepts of change management that is applicable in the clinical area, where the leaders and managers take up the roles of change agents. It is accepted that many of the organisational changes can be a rational and controlled process that works out in an orderly fashion. In reality, especially in the clinical work place areas, changes happen in a chaotic manner. This chaos results from shifting goals, discontinuous activities, surprising events, and combinations of changes and outcomes that are unexpected. This absence of predictability indicates that the system that undergoes a change, actually behaves as an intricately complex system, the parameters of which are dynamic. A system has been defined as a set of working elements that are interrelated and interconnected together to generate an entirely new functional property of its own, instead of that predicted from the conglomeration of those of its parts. Thus, activity within a system can be the expressions of the interactions and influence of one subsystem over the other. As in an organism, many processes occur following a feed-back loop that can be either positive or negative, in the system concept, these complex networks of interrelated functional subsystems can amplify, balance, or refute some functions, ultimately resulting in the output. As has been indicated earlier, systems can be open or closed. This concept is relatively simple in that closed systems operate autonomously independent of the environment. Open systems base on exchanges with the environment both in terms of energy and information. Thus, if change is to take place, the system must be open, and when talking about change management, it talks about an approach based on the concepts of open systems only (DOH, 2000, 43-86). Thus it is mandatory to understand organisations in the line of system thinking, where events, issues, incidents, and forces work as a part of the whole system, not as isolated phenomena. Although these are components of a complex entity as a whole, these express themselves in an interconnected and interdependent fashion. In the clinical area, specially as applicable to the management in NHS, the managers and clinicians use the whole system thinking to devise the change management strategies. If one analyses the practicability of such an approach, these strategies would emanate from the basic tenets of the open systems approach. The interrelated forces in the clinical area work in a closely related manner of functioning of interdependent subsystems, such as, nurses, patients, clinicians, educators, technicians, and so on. The output of such a system is standard and quality care of the clients. Therefore, this system must be analysed within the perspectives of its environment. The existing system would continue to function, unless its equilibrium with the environment is disturbed with application of external force. Although the personal views of the stakeholders within a system vary among each other, collectively, all the stakeholders have a holistic viewpoint regarding the purpose and function of the system (Dixon, 2005, 852). Applying this analysis into the clinical area, in order to implement and manage a necessary change, the manager needs to be aware of the multifactorial issues involved in the healthcare scenario. If the aim of the system is to provide seamless care of the patients, it is important for the change manager to take avid interest in designing, planning, and managing organisations as livid and interrelated systems with ability to recognise the need for development of shared values, purposes, and collaborative practices within the organisation and in between the different organisations. This system, therefore, would be vast with interplay of the interests of a wide range of stakeholders, and the successful manager could beget the desired change through large group or subsystem interventions. Before going into the critical analysis of the literature in this area, it would be worthwhile to examine the organisational pattern of the NHS. Researchers have worked in this area to elucidate the characteristics that feature the ranges and diversities of the stakeholders, intricate and complex ownership and researching arrangements, and the ethically backed professional autonomy of many of the stakeholders. This makes the organisation very complex in that specialisation within the organisation has led to a system of collaboration and interdependence between practitioners from different processes of socializations. Over and above that, there are continuing technical and organisational advances that make the system dynamic and more complex. Added to these, different client groups differ in their needs and expectations on the face of priorities that are set locally, allocations of resources, and varying strategies for performance management. NHS as an organisation has a goal to embrace continuous and emergent changes, and this needs skill development of the stakeholders in NHS towards handling changes in a complex environment that displays a complicated interplay between conflicting objectives and constrained resources (Greener, 2008, 194-210). Chau and Tam present an exploratory study to elucidate the factors that affect the adoption of an open systems approach. Although this study is based on management of information system infrastructure, there are certain valid points that can be of use in the area of interest of this work presented here. The adoption of open systems, despite being a major paradigm shift, can be viewed as a locus focused on standard compliance. The authors find evidence from literature that there is a gross scarcity of literature in this area to the extent of 'no interest" of the academic community in open systems. This study is important in the sense that this focuses on identification of the factors that affect the actual adoption of open systems. Open systems have three important properties. Every open system represents a unique way to interconnect a large number of components. It is obvious that the level of complexity would increase exponentially with the increase in the number of components. As change begins to take place, every component would adjust to the changed environment, and that would lead to newer versions of the components with every intermediate states of change. This would make the process complicated further until the final change goal is achieved. It is easy to perceive that given such a high level of complexity, the behaviour of the integrated system cannot be accurately predicted. It has been accurately commented that before the implementation of the end system, each system in the dynamic state behaves in a unique way and can hardly be experienced in a holistic fashion with all its implications. Thus development and management of an open system would require knowledge of the individual components and also of the interconnecting feedback loops working among them and their effects. Open systems are highly advocated approaches to better accommodate the complex health infrastructure that comprises of multiple platforms with different connectivity arrangements between the subsystems. Research in organisational behaviour indicates that task complexity will promote the ability of the organisation to innovate since this leads to the creation of specialized positions or units. This would connect immediately to the factor of subsystem heterogeneity, and even in a complex open system like clinical level healthcare system, management becomes consistently difficult to draw a harmonious pattern between the components of the process or the system (Chau and Tam, 1997, 1-24). As evident in the NHS patterns and guidelines, the NHS attempts to enforce a standard compliance for all practicing professionals in the system development and management. Although it may look problematic, NHS assumed the leadership role in many healthcare innovations just due to the fact that this complex structure had provided the management with the impetus to explore means that are novel, to resolve these problems. Open systems imply changes in the process in which applications are developed and managed, and compliance to standards is a core requirement for this process and approach to work in an acceptably desirable manner. It has been postulated that higher degrees of formalization on developments of systems and its management would positively affect the likelihood of adoptions of open systems. The NHS comprises many subsystems. The output and outcomes of each of these subsystems serve as feedback loops of those of each other. These have potentials to serve as closed loops apparently. In reality, the distinction between general practice governed primary care and secondary care delivered in the hospital setting clinical areas. The advances in technologies have driven modification of practice scenarios such that minor investigations and treatments are being increasingly carried out in general practice areas, but still then, there are very intimate links between the two. Those who know the clinical areas and their interactions in healthcare delivery systems, they know that healthcare, now, is dependent on close interactions and links between the component clinical and paraclinical departments within the hospitals which operate as subsystems within an open system. The system operates in such a way that hospitals also depend, collaborate, and inter-react with external clinics within the primary care systems (Richardson, Sitzia, and Cotterell, 2005, 210-220). The efficiency of a system is indicated by its performance, and therefore, the managers have used performance measures and preset criteria to measure the performance through audit processes. The relationship with change management in this scenario has both formal and informal aspects to analyze. Historically, the performance indicators were formally introduced in the NHS about two decades ago. Several authors have indicated that mere publication of statistical data as performance indicators reflect the increasing managerial and political concerns as opposed to the given fact that health services do not have standardized inputs in client terms as well as reflections of a wide variety of demands determined by the prevalent health needs of the clients in their local environments. In the year 1999, more changes took place, and these reflected a further change in the tendency to centralize and an increased emphasis upon national standards. To establish patterns of treatments of specific conditions and guidelines, organizations such as NICE and formalized frameworks such as evidence-based national service frameworks were set up and followed. The direction of performance measurement and management indicates increase in central power and reflects the progressively increased role in structural changes and responsibility in monitoring of the quality measures of the care provided. Further examination leads to the fact that in the context of changes, as these quality measures expanded across services, it would indicate limited clinical freedom of the professionals. Thus the management of these changes clearly indicates a function of controls executed from external sources with negative implications for the subsystem of the professionals who serve as important components of the health system. However, the positive subsystem archetype has also its share in this open system, where there was emphasis on efficiency indicators. It had also been noted that there was difficulties in designing measures of clinical outcome and quality (Baulcomb, 2003, 275-280). A growing number of studies provide powerful reasoning and facts in favour of a more holistic view that considers the interplay between social and technical factors in change and change management. The compatibility between social and technical subsystems is the key to meeting the customer needs, and this ensures the organisation's position in competition. Therefore, it can be concluded that adaptations to the new technologies would dictate an inevitable requirement of change in the relationship between the environmental and technical subsystems which eventually would be transformed into organisational changes. The socio-technical perspectives of these interrelationships and the changes provide an analytical space that can be synthesized considering the technological and social factors in a fairly symmetrical manner. This school of thought, however, has its share of strengths and weaknesses. This provides a framework of investigating organisations on the basis of interrelatedness and function collaboration of the social and technological subsystems of the organisations and the relation of the organizations in which it operates (Carter, Garside, and Black, 2003, i25-i28). Drawing on these discussions, as evidence suggests, the model of organisational development could be the model for managing change in the NHS. Although different researchers and professionals interpret organisational development in different ways, this can be empirically defined as any development programme within the organisation that is designed to meet organisational objectives and the personal objectives simultaneously. Some, however, define this change management tool as a comprehensive programme implemented throughout the organisation through a common open systems approach. The modern day healthcare management is the display of sophisticated organisational development systems that separates knowledge work from manual work, directing the employees or professionals to adopt highly scripted performance in the context of division of labour. This would give rise to hierarchical controls with status and authority arising from stratified organisational cultures (Cribb, 2008, 221-240). Organisational development developed by adopting experiential approaches. This would have established the importance of personal growth and professional development as a tool to deploy organisational development. This model would work when employees are allowed to develop their own ideas at the time of joint diagnosis of problems. They could engage themselves in action learning to achieve personal mastery. The collective personal mastery through learning, as expected, would lead to team learning. Literature demonstrates that organisational development approach has few characteristics. Organisational development is a methodology dictated largely by action research that recognises the importance of the open systems approach. This is a fact that effective change would require participation, and this demands deployment of a stakeholder approach to a pattern of action that is collaborative. It is important to note that the concept of stakeholders was developed in the organisational theory, strategic planning, and corporate social responsibility literatures in the 90s (Erbert, Mearns, and Dena, 2005, 21-58). The pluralist view of organisational reality is founded on the theory that stakeholders are indeed attracted to the organizations to satisfy personal aspirations, and as a result, different people would desire different things from the organisations. Therefore, there must be conflict and politics in the organism of an organisation. The manager needs to be aware about these political processes and the need to adopt a pluralist frame of reference to resolve the natural political issues amongst the stakeholders while managing a change. A logical development of collaborative action is an increased emphasis on personal and organisational learning instead of the conventional training. The change process and the management must consider and appreciate the organisational culture and the humanistic values that the organisation nurtures and the stakeholders pay respect to (Bazzoli et al., 2004, 247-331). Induction of learning inside the organization is an important parameter of change management. The concept of learning organisation as a metaphor serves the purpose of understanding this process in an organisation that behaves as a social system whose subsystems have learned conscious communal process for continually "generating, retaining, and leveraging individual and collective learning to improve performance of the organisational system" in ways significant and meaningful for the stake holders (Grieves, 2000, 54-74). The other facet of this system is a process of monitoring and improving performance. As described by researchers, in the organisation as a learning system, the change managers have key roles to perform, and they can serve as key players whose authority, vision, and imagination could create the appropriate environment of learning in order to create a learning organization. In implementing the change process, like any organism, the organisation may suffer learning disabilities that might be managed by development of an organisational design that stimulates, generates, and maintains a learning process through mastery of five core disciplines. As enumerated in the research, these are self-mastery, shared vision, team learning, mental models, and systems thinking. In this way, the organisation can develop a system that can facilitate individual learning in order to continuously transform the entire organisation. Through this model, an organisation that undergoes change would need an adequate supply of knowledge workers, would necessitate identification, development, and evaluation of knowledge workers and their outputs, would be able to motivate and reward the knowledge workers in order to maximise productivity and quality, and most importantly, would ensure the ability to structure the organisation in order to facilitate change transitions to the new organisational forms (Davies and Nutley, 2000, 998-1001). Conclusion: The concept of change through the model of open systems in an organisation is not a series of linear events. As dictated by the organism allegory, changes in an organisation are very complex with many unforeseen critical events during the change process. These can impede, hasten, or redirect the change process implementation and management. Therefore, the managers would need to make continuous assessments, choices, and adjustments to the initiatives of change, originally outside the scope of the planned change processes. Therefore an open systems approach could be employed as a means to manage change where the change is nothing but a process of exploration with unknown destinations, and managing them would need expertise in chaos management that carry consequences of interrelated open-feedback subsystems. Reference List Baulcomb, JS, (2003). Management of change through force field analysis. J Nurs Manag; 11(4): 275-80. Bazzoli, GJ., Dynan, L., Burns, LR., and Yap, C., (2004). Two Decades of Organizational Change in Health Care: What Have we Learned Med Care Res Rev; 61: 247 - 331. Carter, S., Garside, P., and Black, A., (2003). Multidisciplinary team working, clinical networks, and chambers; opportunities to work differently in the NHS. Qual. Saf. Health Care; 12: i25 - i28. Chau,PYK and Tam, KY, (1997). Factors Affecting the Adoption of Open Systems: An Exploratory Study. MIS Quarterly. 1-24. Cribb, A., (2008). Organizational Reform and Health-care Goods: Concerns about Marketization in the UK NHS. J Med Philos; 33: 221 - 240. Davies, H. and Nutley, S. (2000). Developing learning organisations in the new NHS. British Medical Journal 320: 998-1001. Department of Health (DOH). 2000. The NHS Plan. London: The Stationery Office, 43-86. Dixon, J., (2005). Reforming the NHS in England. BMJ; 331: 852. Erbert, LA, Mearns, GM., and Dena, S, (2005). Perceptions of Turning Points and Dialectical Interpretations in Organizational Team Development. Small Group Research; 36: 21 - 58. Greener, I., (2008). Decision Making in a Time of Significant Reform: Managing in the NHS. Administration Society; 40: 194 - 210. Grieves, J., (2000). Navigating change into the new millennium: themes and issues for the learning organization. The Learning Organization, 7, 2; 54-74 Heward, S., Hutchins, C., and Keleher, H., (2007). Organizational change-key to capacity building and effective health promotion. Health Promot. Int.; 22: 170 - 178. Richardson, A., Sitzia, J., and Cotterell, P., (2005). 'Working the system'. Achieving change through partnership working: an evaluation of cancer partnership groups. Health Expect; 8(3): 210-20. Rowe, A and Hogarth, A., (2005). Use of complex adaptive systems metaphor to achieve professional and organizational change. J Adv Nurs; 51(4): 396-405. Taber, TD, (2007) Using Metaphors To Teach Organization Theory. Journal of Management Education; 31: 541 - 554 Weiner, BJ., Amick, H., and Lee, SD., (2008). A Review of the Literature in Health Services Research and Other Fields. Med Care Res Rev; 65: 379 - 436. Read More