As the systems thinking pioneer Gregory Bateson pointed out, there is an important difference between seeing with one eye and seeing with two. With monocular vision even the much prized Big Picture can be merely a flat and featureless panorama. Binocular vision affords a sense of depth and contour, and enhances the view.
When I wrote recently about the “What the Business Wants” viewpoint, Nick Gall challenged me to state whether I was referring to nominal purpose or defacto purpose (POSIWID). My answer was that the “What the Business Wants” viewpoint gave us a vantage point from which we could view both nominal purposes and defacto purposes at the same time, and appreciate the rich dependencies and contradictions between them.
So what happens when I apply the same thinking to the other five viewpoints? Each viewpoint has a monocular version (simple, linear) and a binocular version (rich, multi-dimensional). Here are a few key differences.
| Flat | Rounded | Links | ||
| Strategic View | What the Business Wants | Nominal purpose Nominal strategy |
Defacto purpose Emergent strategy |
Enterprise POSIWID |
| Capability View | How the Business Does | Operational capability Hard dependencies Top-down leadership |
Sociotechnical capability and competency Soft dependencies Edge leadership |
|
| Activity View | What the Business Does | Linear synchronous process (value chain) | Asynchronous collaboration (value network) | Changing Conceptions of Business Process |
| Knowledge View | What the Business Knows | Formal information systems | Informal information systems Sensemaking Appreciative systems |
|
| Management View | How the Business Thinks | Goal-directed behaviour Management by objectives Single loop learning First order cybernetics (VSM) |
Second-order cybernetics (Bateson/Maturana) Double-loop and deutero learning |
Organizations as Brains |
| Organization View | What the Business Is | Enterprise | Business-as-a-Platform Ecosystem |
But how should I label the two columns? Should I succumb to the temptation to label the first column “traditional”? Any suggestions?
