The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by MIT’s Peter Senge was a seminal book on systems thinking, at the core of which was the premise that if you have good people with a bad system, the system will win every time.
We are often confronted by systems thinking in the standard response to organisational failure “it is a systemic problem and we must make sure that it never happens again”. With some irony, this often results in a “root a branch review” swiftly followed by the decision to augment the “management team” to virtually guarantee that it will happen again.
From a vendor management perspective, the systemic challenge of nurturing innovation requires us to rethink some “bad systems”, extended to encompass issues with organisational alignment.
The traditional model for Consulting firms has been long-term engagements with clients, where profitability is predicated on the gradual substitution of senior staff by junior staff enabled by high rates of attrition.
Occasionally, this is combined with managing to the point of an acceptable level of dissatisfaction, an art form to behold with enthusiastic but crucially powerless junior staff, who are effectively taking a good beating.
Now let’s contrast that with what is required to effectively deliver on innovation. We need experienced, knowledgeable people with the capacity to apply that accumulated knowledge and enough time to think.
We should challenge any popular notions that vendor engagements can only be limited to commodity delivery. Clients need to invest in vendors whose business models drive low attrition rates and raise their expectations concerning the role vendors can take in their quest for real innovation. Vendors need to meet that challenge by engaging with clients to address challenges, and ensuring that its people are afforded the time and the space to be innovative.
From a vendor management perspective innovation is very much a systemic challenge, and for sure if it’s not considered as such it will never happen again.