No abstract

Worldwide, project management is gaining acceptance as a business competency for many organizations. On one hand, the authors note a growing interest in the use of elements of project management in virtually every segment of every industry. On the other hand, long-term investment in project management remains a tough sell at the executive level. Knowing that the lack of senior management support is consistently identified as a key factor in failed projects, this disconnect is of growing concern for practitioners. This paper presents the preliminary results of the first phase of a research project designed to develop an understanding of the reasons for this conundrum.

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the complexity of goods, products, and services that society has come to demand. This has necessitated a corresponding growth in the requirements demanded of organizational systems and the people who work in them. The competence a person requires to be effective in working in such systems has become an area of increased interest to scholars and practitioners in many disciplines. How can we assess the degree to which a person is executing the competencies required to do good systems work? Several industries now utilize maturity models in the attempt to evaluate and cultivate people's ability to effectively execute complex tasks. This paper will examine current thought regarding the value and pitfalls of maturity models. It will identify principles and exemplars that could guide the development of a Maturity Model of Systems Thinking Competence (MMSTC) for the varied roles people inhabit in systems contexts.

Contemporary organizations are teleological-purposive-structures, designed to fulfil myriad societal needs. The purposive efforts of any organization are shaped by knowledge. Organizational knowledge includes both conscious and unconscious dimensions. This paper argues that a similar duality applies to organizational teleology. Organizational behaviour unfolds in service to consciously understood teleological aims (such as corporate strategies and business plans) and also unconscious teleological aims (that are undesigned or emergent), which are subtler to detect. Said differently, organizational behaviour is always purposive. Many of the intentions driving organizational behaviour are publicly understood and sanctioned; others are less well understood and unsanctioned. To the degree that some purposive behaviour in organizations remains unconscious, it may detract resources from managerial objectives and confound organizational change efforts. Drawing from facets of systems theory, this paper briefly discusses collective, purposive, and patterned characteristics of unconscious behaviour that may help practitioners to detect and respond to it.

Five clusters of concern arising from IFSR‐facilitated conversations with its organisational members are used to invite the broader systems community to rethink agency. It is argued that by addressing the cluster elements, potential will be co‐created for the systems community as a whole to help citizens venture beyond failing responses to the global problematique and the Anthropocene‐creating thinking in which we humans are trapped. The five clusters are as follows: Exploring the in‐between: Growing a shared understanding is going beyond a competition of ideas or a clash of concepts. It is a joint exploration of the unknown in‐between. Including the excluded: Systems research happens in open research ecosystems, not in disciplinary silos. It is transdisciplinary and constitutes a global discourse. Living questions: Questions shape paradigms. Transcending paradigms starts from allowing the questions to have their own life, to grow and to dissolve, to improve and to transform. Going beyond systems literacy: Learning to speak systems is one thing, proficiency in systems thinking, systems doing and systems being another. There is a difference between knowing and understanding that we may address as systems wisdom. Rethinking agency: Agency goes from ego to eco, from me to we. Yet, it is not an either–or; it is ego and eco, me and we. To understand agency, we need to understand the ‘and’.