How does a team or organization function?
A team or organization constantly receives information from its environment, its members, its clients, its objectives, and its own operations.
This information circulates through exchanges, decisions, behaviors, processes, and relationships.
The way in which they are perceived, transmitted and processed directly influences an organization's ability to adapt, cooperate, decide and mobilize its resources.
Observing an organization as a system allows us to understand differently some of the difficulties that arise in its daily operation.
1. An organization is a living system
An organization is not simply the sum of the people who make it up.
Each individual has their own way of functioning, resources, responsibilities and way of responding to situations. But each also participates in a larger whole made up of interactions, roles, rules, objectives and information that circulate.
A change in one part of the system can therefore have consequences elsewhere.
A communication breakdown can affect a decision. A decision can alter commitment. Overwork in one team can lead to compensation in another.
Understanding an organization therefore requires observing both the elements that compose it and the relationships between these elements.
2. Information must be able to circulate
An organization is constantly receiving signals.
They may come from:
• employees
• customers
• the market
• results
• relationships between teams
• internal or external changes
But receiving information does not necessarily mean being able to process it.
Information can be known without being truly integrated. It can be filtered, delayed, interpreted differently depending on the level of the organization, or never reach the place where a decision could be made.
The quality of operation therefore depends not only on the information available, but also on its ability to circulate and be processed.
3. Under pressure, teams develop compensatory strategies
When an organization encounters a difficulty that it cannot deal with using its usual resources, it seeks to maintain its operations.
Compensatory mechanisms may then emerge:
• Increased controls
• Overburdened individuals or functions
• Centralized decision-making
• Avoidance of certain topics
• Increased number of meetings
• Tensions between teams
• Maintenance of costly processes
These answers are not necessarily errors.
They may have allowed the organization to continue operating during a difficult period.
The problem arises when a temporarily useful response becomes a permanent mode of operation and continues to mobilize resources even though the situation has changed.
4. Difficulties are rarely isolated
Stress, disengagement, conflicts, communication problems, burnout or leadership difficulties may appear to be independent problems.
In the reality of how a team functions, they are often linked.
Sustained overload can affect communication. Insufficient communication can increase tensions. Tensions can slow down decision-making. Unclear decisions can, in turn, reduce commitment.
That is why acting solely on the visible manifestation does not always allow for a lasting change in the functioning that produces it.
It then becomes useful to observe where resources are mobilized, where circulation becomes more difficult, and where compensations appear.
5. Regulating does not mean returning to the previous state
An organization is constantly evolving.
New employees arrive, responsibilities change, markets evolve, teams transform, and new constraints emerge.
Regulation, therefore, does not consist of constantly bringing the organization back to a previous state considered ideal.
It refers to its ability to adjust its functioning to what it encounters while maintaining sufficient consistency to continue fulfilling its function.
This also implies recovery capabilities.
An organization that can mobilize but can no longer recover gradually ends up consuming more resources to maintain the same level of functioning.
6. Develop collective resources
An organization has resources that are not limited to individual skills.
Communication, cooperation, trust, decision-making capacity, adaptation, recovery, and the quality of leadership also constitute collective resources.
They are built through interactions and reinforce each other.
This is why commitment, resilience, stress, burnout, communication or leadership are not necessarily independent issues.
They can represent different entry points for observing and developing the system's overall capacity to function, adapt, and evolve.
7. Observe what changes in how it works
Organizational transformation is not measured solely by understanding a problem or by satisfaction expressed after an intervention.
It manifests itself in daily operations.
Does information flow more easily? Do decisions require less energy? Do teams recover better after a period of intense activity? Can tensions be addressed before they escalate into conflicts? Do employees have more options for responding to situations they encounter?
These changes allow us to observe whether the system is actually developing new resources.
Understanding how a team or organization functions is therefore not about finding someone to blame or a universal solution.
The aim is to understand how the system mobilizes its resources, processes what it encounters and adapts, in order to identify the conditions that will allow it to regain more coherence, autonomy and capacity for action.
An organization does not become more efficient simply by mobilizing more resources, but by developing its capacity to use them where they are truly needed.