[I know this isn’t precisely systems thinking – though ethno-methodography has a rich and related history – but it is very interesting and relevant. See below for two interesting facts!]

Harvard Business Review

https://hbr.org/2019/12/can-you-know-too-much-about-your-organization

How much do you know about the end-to-end operations of your organization? If you looked closely, would you see a deliberate strategy or the results of years and years of patches, workarounds, political truces, and shadow systems? Now imagine you had carte blanche to clean it up — redesign operations to be more efficient, more effective, more focused on getting things done. Would this experience change how you see your current efforts and responsibilities? According to research, it might: A study of six project teams tasked with redesigning their organization’s operations found that many ended up disillusioned with the patchwork systems they saw. Further, almost half of the participants left their established careers as managers, feeling as though they couldn’t enact meaningful change in their roles.

Paper:

• Ruthanne Huising
• Published in Organization science… 26 June 2019

Abstract: This paper examines how employees become spontaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, consistent knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction.

I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees’ orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization’s inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.

[PDF] Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates | Semantic Scholar

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Moving-off-the-Map%3A-How-Knowledge-of-Organizational-Huising/409921a252db8f9610cb22ff24acd6fc8e153e64

[Interesting facts time

1. as pointed out by @meaningness (David Chapman), this paper took a really long time to be published!

2. in googling the author, she has the highest ratings I’ve ever seen on that student review thing for professors (as well as universally positive comments on Twitter)]