(highlight:: Organizational Informatics: Finding the Right Questions By Engaging Diverse Stakeholders
Summary:
In a module called organizational informatics, the writer learned about the soft systems methodology, a structured approach to understanding different stakeholders' perspectives on a problem.
This methodology encourages embracing diverse viewpoints and leads to questions rather than answers.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
My program was a module called organizational informatics. It's a funky name for a design program course. And in that module, I studied about this thing called soft systems methodology. And it was taught by a fairly eccentric professor, British professor. And basically what I learned about that was how to go around stakeholder groups to almost kind of like apply user research to learn about different stakeholders perspectives on a problem. Because, you know, the assumption is that there's a problem to be solved. It's messy. It's challenging. And you're going to have to work with lots of different people. And so soft systems methodology methodology had a structured approach that taught you how to go about going around messy organizations to get perspectives from different people And sort of embraced the differences that people had about a thing, you know, whether it was a different ways of looking at a problem space, all of their divergent feelings and needs And goals, all of the conflicts, all of those things sort of embrace that as part of the process. And one of the funny things that I learned about the end, you know, where does it lead to, right, was not an answer. It doesn't get you to answer. What it gets you to is a question.)
- Time 0:11:58
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(highlight:: The Absence of Blame in Systems Thinking
Summary:
In the systems thinking space, there's a quote by Peter Singay that emphasizes there is no blame when applying a system sense to things.
This was highlighted in a documentary created by Gregory Bates' daughter, where she realized that it's not just individuals at fault, but the entire system that leads to certain behaviors.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
A quote that gets used a lot in the systems thinking space. It's a quote from Peter Singay in his book, The Fifth Discipline. And one of the things that he calls out is that when you apply a system sense on things, there really is no blame. You can't really point someone and say, and say, that's that person's fault. And I was watching a video from another systems thinking expert, Gregory Bates, and it was his daughter who's a filmmaker created this documentary about her father. And in there, there's a there's a part where one of her daughters is talking about her observations of a schizophrenic child patient and her his parents. And she was also going through a self realization of the fact that initially she had been pointing out, oh, the child is at fault. And the parent is at fault, oh, the therapist is at fault. And then she's, it's only hit her that no, it's the whole system. The whole thing combined the way it works causes certain behaviors to bubble up.)
- Time 0:17:42
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(highlight:: Blame Conditions, Not People: A Key to Understanding and Empathy
Summary:
Labeling conditions helped me understand and empathize with rude or confusing behavior, reducing frustration and blame.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I used to get really mad at people who I thought were rude, or I didn't understand. Why they were behaving the way they were behaving. It didn't seem rational or fair to me. And one thing that really helped me a lot was labeling conditions. You know, oh, that person is, you know, such and such. They're ADHD. Oh, okay, that explains things. And suddenly I would start feeling like that sense of frustration and desire to blame dissolve.
Speaker 1
And it was very liberating.)
- Time 0:19:06
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