"The System Made Me Do It"
By Janice Molloy
It's a core principle of systems thinking: The underlying structure greatly influences--if not determines--the behavior of an
y system. In a sidebar to their article "A Culture of Candor" in the June 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review, James O'Toole and Warren Bennis talk about the power that organizational systems have to shape the behavior of their employees. To back up their claim, they refer to the classic 1971 experiment into group dynamics by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo--a study that provides cautionary lessons for leaders of any kind of organization.
In the experiment, Zimbardo divided a group of Stanford students into guards and prisoners. He and his colleagues created a mock prison in the basement of the psychology building, closely simulating the atmosphere and power dynamics in a typical penal unit. The situation quickly deteriorated, with the student "guards" psychologically and physically abusing the "inmates." The researchers cancelled the simulation after just six days.
Concurring with Zimbardo's conclusions from the Stanford experiment and subsequent research, O'Toole and Bennis state that "human behavior is determined more by situational forces and group dynamics than by our inherent nature. . . . Ethical problems in organizations originate not with ‘a few bad apples' but with the ‘barrel makers'--the leaders who, wittingly or not, create and maintain the systems in which participants are encouraged to do wrong."
The deep-seated cultural problems with companies such as Enron have been well documented. As A. J. Schuler says in his article, "Does Corporate Culture Matter?: The Case of Enron," "Unethical or illegal individual actions are sometimes symptoms of systemic problems, and Enron's systems of accountability, oversight, ethical disclosure and corporate priorities were seriously flawed." Similar unquestioned value systems and patterns of behavior undoubtedly contributed to the global mortgage crisis.
The good news is that we can just as easily design systems that bring out the best in people. According O'Toole and Bennis, "Instead of wasting millions of dollars on ethics courses designed to exhort employees to be good, it would be far more effective to create corporate cultures in which people are rewarded for doing good things." The challenge is developing leaders who have the will, foresight, perseverance, and courage to put these kinds of structures in place.
Knowing how powerful systems can be at rejecting change, how can each of us learn to take personal responsibility for challenging unethical or dysfunctional practices? How can we buck the tide of conformity to shift business as usual? How can we avoid falling prey to the "just following orders" syndrome?
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.
photo: Nancy Daugherty