In the educational system, disciplines are broken into their individual parts. Students major in marketing, accounting, or computer science. Achieving excellence in an individual discipline requires this approach. As important as excellence in a particular discipline, however, is an understanding of the interaction of that discipline with the rest of the organization.

I majored in music theory and composition, and had the honor of conducting choirs and orchestras during my studies. The performance of music within a group, whether a symphony orchestra, a choir, or a rock band, is inherently a systems discipline. If the best singer in the world is unable to blend their tone and volume with the rest of a choir, the result will be an uncomfortable listening experience. The same holds true for trumpet players, violinists, or any orchestral musician. They must master their individual instrument, and they must also master the skill of performing within the system of the orchestra.

Disneyland is one of the most elegant systems ever designed, delicately tuned to the creation of memorable, magical experiences for its guests. If everything about Disneyland remained the same, but the employees running the stores, restaurants, and rides all began behaving impatiently and impolitely toward guests, the system, and therefore the experience, would break down. If Disney tried to solve this problem by making tickets less expensive or investing in the creation of new rides, the system would continue to operate below its potential because the system requires high performance across the sum of its parts, and higher performance in a single part of the system cannot make up for low performance in another part of the system.

To further demonstrate the interconnectedness of systems, even the attempt to solve the problem by directly focusing on the employees presents a systems problem. Laying off the entire workforce to hire and train an entirely new set of employees, aside from the obvious misapplication of a mechanistic worldview in treating humans like replaceable machines, would result in backlash in the media and the expense of shutting down the park until the new workforce was hired and trained. Furthermore, replacing the workforce would not be the right solution if employee behavior changed due to a deficit in training or management programs, issues with shift lengths, or frustrations around wage. It would only be a matter of time before these conditions recreated challenges within the new workforce. The solution would be found within the interactions within these many interconnected parts of the system.

This requires a new form of leadership, evolved beyond the principles and habits of twentieth‐century leadership, the conditions of which neither pursued nor welcomed empathy or feelings at work. In disentangling from a mechanistic worldview to a social systems worldview, the underlying motivation and belonging of the people who make up the broader system of an organization is a part of the system that cannot be overlooked. Fear was a powerful tool in past leadership regimes, but the social systems of the twenty‐first century no longer accept fear as a motivating force. There are exceptions where fear continues to reign, usually in conjunction with fewer employment options, but the tolerance for command‐and‐control leadership has decreased in correlation to the increase of other employment opportunities and examples through the Internet.

Music provides a great analogy for this as well. If one could find a conductor who leads an orchestra through fear, and yet somehow manages to keep the players from leaving for other orchestras, those players, under fear of their leader, may play the correct notes at the perfect rhythm and at the right volume, but the music will ring hollow in the ears of the audience.

But the absence of fear is still not enough to lead a twenty‐first century team or organization through a meaningful transformation or to retain or achieve a market leadership position. Great orchestral or choral conductors are not defined by their lack of poor leadership, but by their ability to inspire their people to each bring the best of themselves to the performance and to harmonize the group into a single unit (social system) on both a technical and emotional level.

Intraorganizational Systems

Leaders who successfully navigate the era of Autonomous Transformation to achieve meaningful market impact will be those who manage the interaction between the parts of the systems they oversee as well as the interaction with parts of the systems they do not oversee. At the C‐level, this means managing the interactions between the organizations that fall within the leaders’ purview as well as the interactions between those organizations and the organizations that do not fall within their purview. A chief technology officer could hire and develop the most talented technologists in the market, but if those technologists do not work well with the domain experts for whom they need to build technology solutions, the organization and the system have both failed.

This holds true at the vice president, general manager, director, and manager levels as well. Maintaining a strong business portfolio is an important contribution to the overarching organization, but ensuring the organization and its teams work cohesively with one another is equally important.

At the manager level, leadership begins with an understanding of each team member as an individual. What motivates them, what unique skills and experiences they bring to the team, how they do their best work, and where they feel belonging are starting points for understanding the person whose skills, decisions, and actions will contribute to the social systems of the team and the broader organization. This requires more effort than just getting to know each team member at a surface level, but it also affords managers the opportunity to better align work with the individual best suited to accomplish the outcome, based both on their skills as well as the role they play within the team and organization.

If a manager is presented with a request, for example, of the type that has always been routed to one particular team member, they may decide to follow the pattern for a number of reasons, such as the convenience of following a preexisting structure, the convenience of mutual understanding with that team member, or the known quality of that team member's output on that sort of task. Upon deeper understanding of the team, however, which is much more likely to be drawn out by an empathic manager than volunteered, it could be learned that the team member to whom that work is generally assigned has tired of the repetition of completing the same sort of task. This means that the quality is unlikely to improve and may even degrade with each new task of that nature assigned to that team member. Fortuitously, and not uncommonly for managers who are listening to their people, another team member may have confided in the manager that they are interested in learning more about the business and taking on challenging new tasks. Assigning the task to this team member, under guidance from the team member to whom the task had previously been assigned, creates the opportunity for a new degree of motivation and a new lens of experiences to be applied to the task. It also forms a new connection point between the two team members and engenders trust with the team member to whom the task has historically been assigned, and frees their bandwidth to focus on a new task or work stream, which they can approach with renewed vigor and interest.

Interorganizational Systems

In an interorganizational context, an issue could arise between individuals who report to different leaders. I once experienced this within a consulting organization. I was leading a technology practice, and my team consisted of consultants embedded on‐site with clients. Through delivering great work and being in regular proximity with our clients, they were building strong, trusting relationships. One day, I got a message from one of our clients that a peer of mine from the business development and account management organization had scheduled time with her to discuss future projects. The client had taken the meeting, assuming the account management leader was planning to discuss opportunities to work with other practices within our firm since she was already working closely with our team. To her surprise, he wanted to spend the meeting scoping a roadmap of technology projects. When she asked if they could reschedule for a time that I or someone from my practice could join, he told her that I and my team were better focused on execution, and that he would be her partner in ideation.

Even if he had been an expert in technology, this overtly political move damaged our credibility with the client. In troubleshooting what had happened, I learned that it was systemic to our firm. Account managers received incentives for every deal for which they could demonstrate they made material contribution. My incentives were similar, but whoever “sparked” the deal would receive a much greater incentive.

The embedded nature of my practice meant that we would be first in line for sparking new deals without an intervention such as the one staged by my colleague. Furthermore, since we did not need his expertise to solution technology projects, no one had thought to include him in scoping, which meant he could not demonstrate material contribution to any of our extensions or new projects, and he was watching new deals, for which he had made the initial introductions, get booked in the system—deals for which he would not get compensated. Neither I nor my team were aware of this dynamic.

My motivation in approaching this problem was to discover what may have provoked my colleague's actions and resolve the issue as quickly as possible to ensure we did not lose business as a result of a lack of professionalism. Those with experience in consulting can relate to how quickly multiple millions of dollars of business can vanish with a slipup like this.

As frustrated as I was with my colleague's behavior, from a systemic perspective, I was not going to be able to solve the problem by focusing on his actions. He knew it was a risky move, but he was economically incented to try to find a way to inject his way into existing deals, and even more so to generate new deals.

Once I learned the full picture of the system, I could empathize with my colleague's motivations, although I still disagreed with his choices. I was able to understand the dilemma and frustration of leveraging one's cultivated network, introducing practice leaders, and seeing incentives decrease over time as practice leaders sold extensions and new projects. The system was imbalanced in favor of practice leaders, as account managers could not scope and close deals without practice managers.

Since we both knew the problem was going to affect our clients adversely, hurting long‐term profitability for the whole firm, we brainstormed ways to resolve the systemic conflict of interests. Fortunately, we were able to find a solution we both agreed would be economically feasible for the firm and personally motivating for ourselves and our colleagues, and we presented the solution to our colleagues for their support. Together with their support, we approached our leadership team to propose the change, to which they agreed.

The change we proposed was focused on resolving the interaction between our two organizations when it came to selling new projects or project extensions, which would systemically remove the temptation for poor actions. Any sales that fell within an account covered by a given account manager would automatically contribute to that account manager's sales incentives, regardless of deal‐by‐deal involvement. Likewise, practice leader incentives shifted to focusing solely on billable hours within their practices. This removed the “meaningful contribution” clause, which meant we could divvy up efforts on sales pursuits based on whoever would be the most likely to land the deal with no economic incentive to compete with one other. In terms of the original client with whom this story began, my account management colleague was now paid for every new deal that my team landed, even if he had not heard about it until it was booked in the system. He was thus incented to recenter his focus on new deals and clients, which benefited his personal motivation as well as the whole system.

Industry‐Specific Organizational Systems

Each industry has nuances to the way its organizations, systems, and ecosystems operate. In the financial sector, for example, there are no machine‐filled factories. In oil and gas, technicians fly in helicopters to oil tankers in the ocean to repair systems that are not operating properly. In agriculture, there are hundreds of millions of acres of farmland that have no Internet or phone signal. In medicine, nurses and doctors combine science and kindness to heal wounds and diseases while endeavoring to create safe spaces to maintain patient dignity and mental wellbeing. In the utilities sector, technicians are assigned to travel around a state fixing and maintaining transformers and power lines. In the food industry, supply chain delays can mean wasting entire shipments of goods.

From a systems perspective, the interworkings of people, technological systems, business and legal policies, and the ecosystems that make up each industrial sector present a high degree of complexity, but fortunately they are not irreducibly complex when examined through a systems lens.

In the manufacturing sector, for example, the information and operational technology organizations are two distinct ecosystems serving distinct groups of manufacturing stakeholders with different (often opposing) incentives. The two organizations are supported by different software and system integration vendors, they have different buying behavior, and whereas information technology professionals make decisions informed by industry analysts, operational technology professionals have relationships with the original equipment manufacturers who make and maintain machinery in the plants, and they have to manage the additional consideration of unions, government, and regulatory bodies.

From an incentives and values perspective, information technologists are rewarded when they consolidate disparate systems, minimize the use of technology systems that are not reviewed and provisioned by the central information technology team, integrate manufacturing systems with enterprise systems, and ensure system‐wide compliance and security. Operational technologists, on the other hand, are focused on leveraging technology to enable manufacturing plants to make production numbers; exceed quality, productivity, and cost targets; and improve safety.

A new project, stemming from either of these two organizations, is not going to intuitively fit neatly into the broader system when examining its parts. The disparity of the two groups, culturally, is well known in the manufacturing sector.

When we examine these groups through a systemic design lens, we can push past the obvious disparities and examine the system as a whole and the mutual benefit of improved interaction between these parts of the system. Manufacturers are able to invest further in new product lines and technologies when they are able to drive cost out of their processes. This is an outcome that would benefit the overarching system, and, therefore, executives from both the information and operational technology organizations.

The issue runs deeper, however, than any set of technological and business priorities—deeper than patching software to a system or instrumenting machinery. Those are only the first layer of considerations in a systems thinking examination of the situation.

Many in the field of manufacturing have a deep sense of cultural history and take pride in their work. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton delivered a report to the United States Congress entitled Report on the Subject of Manufactures, and argued the importance of removing reliance on British manufacturing. “Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of a country, appear to be materially connected to the prosperity of manufactures,” he wrote.

Ensuing centuries provide evidence to the truth of this statement. The accumulation of the Industrial Revolution's expansion from Europe to the United States, Edison's creation of the first industrial research laboratory, and Ford's invention of the first assembly line fostered a national readiness for an unanticipated bolstering of manufacturing ensuing from the disruption of European manufacturing brought about by World War I. This boosted the U.S. economy from reliance on European exports to being the primary exporter worldwide. China has experienced a similar transformation, having transitioned from a developing, agrarian nation in the 1970s, when the United States’ output was several hundred times that of China's, into an industrial powerhouse that produces nearly half of the world's industrial goods, overtaking the United States in global exports in 2010.

Another cultural element central to the manufacturing base is the act of creation. There is a physical, primal aspect to transforming raw elements into useful goods through the process of smelting, casting, crushing, cutting, or dyeing (to name a few).

Understanding the rich culture and history of an industry is a necessary input to the process of designing or redesigning systems within or to serve that industry. A lack of awareness or understanding of these factors is one of the primary reasons technologists and industry professionals have struggled to attain even a small proportion of their shared economic potential.