Hello everyone. I am back from hibernation, and here is my first announcement of the year: the launch of SystemsWayAcademy, a school for leadership and management. If you are wondering what has gotten into Manish that he has started not a company and not a product but a leadership academy, the company and the product are coming too. But first launch of SystemsWayAcademy, why we exist and what we can do for you and your organization other than newsletter, executive offsites and workshops.

A decade ago or so I joined payPal and used to take immense pleasure in driving enterprise wide transformation programs that would systemically and systematically improve productivity, quality and engineering effectiveness of organization, and I did it as an individual contributor, without any positional owner and was very successful at it. The dream was slowly we will fix different aspect of product and software development life cycle systems steadily so they were world class. Then one day I told my bosses I was done, and my reason was simple. It takes two years or more to drive large-scale change across an entire product and software development department. And during those two years, I watched everyone else busily and with good intent creating new systems of exactly the same kind, systems that I could would become the next quagmire and require the next transformation. It was a losing game, and I did not want to play it any more.

Now I could blame systems own for not unerstanong what I was saying but mistake was mine. At the time I was incapable of making them understand why best practices and best tools and best sdfsd that they were instituing will backfire. My ideas were so counter-intuitive that people made fun of them. When I said that our use of GitHub was the root of much of our productivity, quality and social mess, because it improves individual productity but bring down sytemic prouctity and quality and sysemic was way important thatn indivdaul producity, people were up in arms as if github was a religion. When I said that holding people accountable through bug SLAs makes customers suffer more, not less, nobody would see why given this was best practice. When I told the finance and accounting people that capitalizing software development costs because it improve company's profit was actually substantially reducing the company's profitability by millions of dollar. I can keep on going for hour. The mistake was mine. I could not make them see what I was seeing and they were doing what everyone in the industry was doing.

That was the juncture instead of getting frustrated, I asked myself a more profound question. These people are good people. They are smart and have a very good intent. They can first hadn expereince the dysfucntion of their organziaiton which they themselves have created. So why do scientifically minded technologists, who believe technology can solve every problem in the world, fail to solve their own problems of productivity, quality and engineering effectiveness? The question gets more interesting when you notice that the software, product, marketing and financial systems that people suffer in a company and complain about were not built by their competitors or sabotaged by outsiders. They were designed, led and operated by the same people who suffer in them and complain about them.

When I put that question to executives and middle managers, why do peopel crate sytems in which they theylseves suffer, sme answers were unsatisfying, some were wrong and some were outright bad. Let me give you a sample.

The most common answer was complexity. Complexity is the problem, and complexity drives the creation of dysfunctional systems. This is not a bad answer, it is a wrong one. By that argument dysfunction is not caused by us but some exertanl factor so we shall not be held accoutnable. To me that answer was wrong because there are corporations facing the same complexity and they lead and manage their systems far more effectively than us. So the problem is not complexity. The problem is our inability to comprehend complexity for the purpose of leading and managing systems. It is like saying the flood destroyed our village, when the real answer is that we lacked the knowledge to handle heavy rain.

The second answer was not an answer at all. It was an observation disguised as answer. Answer was organizations have high barriers to execution, a lack of collaboration, silos, and the list goes on, tha tcauses dysfucntion. All of that is observation, not explanation. It becomes an answer only when someone can explain why the barriers to execution are high when nobody is deliberately erecting them. Who comes to work saying, today I will not collaborate? Why do people create silos when nobody wants them? With the way answer it likes saying a country is poor because there is rampant poverty which is purse observation and not explanation.

When I pushed people like that, you get the third answer, which is not wrong so much as bad. The answer was we have a cultural problem or in other wards we have a people. People are either bad, untalendted, don't care, or bad behavior, or poor norms whatever it is , it has to do with people See what at statement means. It implicitly means that person make this statement has good cultre but everyone else in the company has no culture. In my experience the opposite is true. When systems start becoming dysfunctional, everybody talks about it, everybody tries to figure out a solution, everybody tries to fix it. Every both via emploey survey infomration manages of high barriers to execution oro lack of collaboration.Every company I have worked in behaved that way. I have never see a cultural problem, I have definately seen peope not caring, or not sfsdf because systems does not allow them to. I was super confident of that because I drive terribley in india, I was a crazy driver, once I moved to USA I was the best driver and very most I go back to indain within fews days I become a terrible drivers. So to me people are the problem is not a wrong answer its a bad answer and even if it's the right answer, who created the hiring sytems via which they came to to the company.. the same people who compalin that peopel and culture are the problem.

Having no satisfactory answer, I started reading. Management books, Organization Theories, too courses at MIT and elsewhere, all carrying one simple question. Why do people create systems in which they themselves suffer, and why do they fail to fix those systems when they experience the dysfunction first hand? I finally found the answer in philosophy, and not just any philosophy, but Systems Philosophy. Here is a very abridged version. See whether it the answer makes sense to you

The systems people create are nothing but a reflection of their collective understanding of how systems should work and it may not match reality. For example people who believe rain comes when the rain god is happy build temples and perform dance rituals only to reality to hit back sooner or later. People who believe rain comes from atmospheric causes do cloud seeding. So when systems are not working the way people want them to, people should not point a finger at the system thats not working but they should point it at their own understanding of system using which they lead, managed and operated the systems

Which means that when smart, scientifically minded technologists create dysfunctional systems, the question they should be asking is what is wrong with their understanding of systems. And here is the interesting part. Scientifically minded technologists do that all the time. They love learning from failure and mistakes. So what is going wrong? Why they dont learn?

Answering that requires a higher-order question. How does a person develop an understanding of systems in the first place? The answer is: by thinking. So our understanding a function of how hard, how deep and how broadly we think. True, but only partially, and that partially is the name of the game. Our understanding is equally a function of the thinking paradigm we think hard, deep and broad with. So if sysmtes dont' work the way we want, thre is a possbilit of being wrong with the thinking paradigm using which we think. Reflect on your thinking paradigm for a moment. When we ask peopel to do that, peopel go blank.

Most people we talk to ask what a thinking paradigm even is. But for a person to think at all, a thinking paradigm has to exist. When people are unaware of their thinking paradigm using which they think, there is a posibility that it's the root cause of dysfcutnion people institute in their sytems. Think of this possiblity. If An unexamined thinking paradigm produces a sub-optimal understanding of systems, and we intervene in systems using that understanding, and when the intervention fails we will never be able connect it back to our thinking paradigm, because we do not know the paradigm using which we think. Just as you were not aware of yours, I was not aware of mine, until this journey made me aware of it. So if you are curious let me tell you what is the thinking paradigm that you use

Most of us, and scientifically minded technologists, logical and rational people meaning, we use same thninking apradimg to hink and name of that thinking paradimg is the analytical reductionist thinking paradigm. No wonder, when we use the word analyse as a synonym for thinking. I learned it hard way that analytical reductionist thinking is superb for understanding, managing and operating non-living mechanical and technological systems, and very sub-optimal for leading and managing social ones. Because we only have one paradigm, and that too unexamined, we can't help but use it everywhere and never trace our problems back to it's sub-optimality. At SystemsWay we say that most people are indoctrinated into the analytical paradigm from childhood onwards, and then again through the teaching of science. We are sure you know the reason why call physics, chemistry and mathematics the analytical sciences, and engineering is the epitome of analytical thinking. But we never know there are alternative sysetms thinking apradimg more suites to understand, lead, and manage social systems and all the systems in corpoation ore social systems to the point we call SDLC a techno-social systems.

And here is what changed once I had Systems Philosophy. I realized that I have an intutive neck to think in sysetms thinking paradigm and i also figured out why I hve that but that for some other day. I fruther honed my systems thinking paradigm which not only enabled me think better but also enalbed me to explain that thinking to my analyticlly exper colelgees so tha tit makese snese. Now I can now explain why source code is the keystone of the entire software development lifecycle, and why GitHub is the wrong instrument for holding it, because it makes each individual product better while making the system worse. I can sit with a CEO and show why capitalizing software development improves the P&L on paper while causing a real loss, hollowing out the company's capacity to deliver software. I can explain why bug SLAs are a bad idea for quality improvment, and why the more strictly you enforce them, the worse quality gets. Every one of those arguments used to get me laughed out of the room, not because the arguments were weak, but because I was making them from a paradigm my audience did not have. But making the argument for you is not what I am interested in. I am interested in your being able to arrive at these observations yourself.

Once I became aware of my own indoctrination, all kinds of questions surfaced. What exactly are the steps and processes that the analytical paradigm prescribes? Why is it so good for non-living systems and so destructive when applied to living ones, whether an ecosystem or a corporation? And you cannot help but start looking for the alternative, or the complementary paradigm, for leading, managing and operating living social systems. Those are the questions we answer at SystemsWayAcademy. Once you learn the newer SystemsWay paradigm, you will rebuild your understanding of every corporate system you work with. As Maria Mielder puts it in her testimonial, once you have gone through the workshop, you can no longer ignore ineffective systems. And for the first time you will have answers to questions you never had good answers for, such as why our scientific and technological knowledge keeps growing, and our mechanical and technological systems keep getting better, while our social systems do not improve at anything like the same pace, and some go backwards.

So let me promise you this. SystemsWayAcademy is not like any other management and leadership school. We do not teach you to lead people or manage people, because we do not believe people need to be led or managed. Leaders do not lead people. They lead systems of which people are a part. Managers do not manage people. They manage systems of which people are a part. Once you learn to lead and manage the system, all that overhead of managing people, all those things traditional management says you must do and that you always quietly suspected were questionable, simply falls away. And one more thing worth noting. While you do not know a solution exists, not finding it is not irresponsible. Once you know a potential solution exists, not going after it is anti-systems.

So join our newsletter, invite us for a leadership offsite talk, and let us set up a workshop. For the first time in decades you will get a breath of fresh air in how we lead and manage people. Sorry, my bad. In how we lead and manage systems of which people are a part.

This is the official launch, but not the beginning. We have been running workshops for a while and assessing their impact, and the systems awareness people walk out with is real. What changes now is the scale.

Able Babu, Engineering Manager, MathWorks: "I now ask how the system failed the person, rather than why the person failed."

More at systemsway.com/testimonials. For leadership offsites and workshops, DM me.

I have a few goals for this life, and one of them is to spread SystemsWay to society at large, not just to corporations. Because as many who have been through it say, SystemsWay is not really management or leadership. It is a thinking school, to the point of becoming a way of life.

Next up in a month: sdlc.works, a software development platform for the age of AI, built on SystemsWay principles.