Systems Intelligence Inventory

Purpose Systems intelligence (SI) (Saarinen and Hämäläinen, 2004) is a construct defined as a person’s ability to act intelligently within complex systems involving interaction and feedback. SI relates to our ability to act in systems and reason about systems to adaptively carry out productive actions within and with respect to systems such as organizations, family and everyday life. This paper develops an inventory to measure the SI construct. Methodology A combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using data from self-report questionnaires is used. Findings Eight factors labeled Systemic Perception, Attunement, Attitude, Spirited Discovery, Reflection, Wise Action, Positive Engagement, and Effective Responsiveness are identified as the main components of SI. SI has associations with Emotional Intelligence but also captures additional dimensions. People in supervisor positions are found to score higher in a number of the SI factors. Originality/value A new measure is developed to evaluate and develop our ability to succeed in systemic contexts. It is suggested to be particularly applicable in organizational contexts. This measure is directly related to the original core disciplines of the learning organization as described by Senge (1990), in particular personal mastery and systems thinking. Introduction Our everyday life is embedded in systems in contexts such as work, organizations, and family. The generic set of abilities involved in the human ability to live successfully in interaction-intensive systemic environments has been conceptualized as Systems Intelligence (SI), which Saarinen and Hämäläinen (2004, p. 3) originally defined as: “Intelligent behavior in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She perceives herself as a part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By observing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive environment, she is able to act intelligently. ” This relatively broad definition integrates conceptual elements that are often held distinct. While pointing to abilities of an individual, it relates to what lies beyond the individual; while referring to an ability that the individual possesses, it points to the operational significance of that ability vis-àvis the mechanisms of the environment. Being able to function systems intelligently requires that a person is able to take into account the relevant systems and their underlying characteristics so that he or she is able to adopt and function productively in the relevant systems. Systems Intelligence (Saarinen and Hämäläinen, 2004, 2010) has already been used to describe the generic aspects of the meta-level skills required for succeeding in systemic settings in a number of areas such as organizations and leadership (Hämäläinen and Saarinen, 2008; Luoma et al., 2008, 2011; Saarinen, 2008), emergency management (Seppänen et al., 2013), psychotherapy (Martela and Saarinen, 2013), communications (Jones et al., 2011), and developmental studies and pedagogy (Jones and Corner, 2012; Saarinen and Lehti, 2014). The key assumption of the SI perspective is that human beings harbor abilities to adapt their actions to holistic settings, here conceptualized as systems. The original core idea in the conceptualization of the learning organization (LO) by Senge (1990) (see also Kofman and Senge, 1993) also relates to the systemic abilities of individuals which allow learning in holistic settings with a systems perspective . There is a relatively wide literature on questionnaires which have been used to measure the learning organization (LO) and in which the focus has been on learning and on the organizational aspects. The most widely used measure is the one developed by Watkins and Marsick (1997), which also has individual level questions with a learning focus. Recently this literature has been strongly criticized by Kim et al. (2015) due to the lack of using proper psychometric analysis and validation methods. Also the earlier literature does not consider in detail the systems competences in organizations or in individuals. There are many constructs to measure organizational learning in general, but very few include the LO perspective as is done in Jerez-Gómez et al. (2005). This paper presents a new new psychometrically validated measure that could have potential in improving the understanding and development of learning organizations. The paper also analyzes how the construct relates to Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1995; Salovey and Mayer, 1989), a competence which has received surprisingly little interest in the LO studies but which is yet considered to be important in organizational behavior (see e.g. Ashkanasy and Daus, 2005). We believe SI is a human core competence in the same way as the well known multiple intelligences described by Gardner (1983). The addition of the SI is motivated by its emphasis of dynamism and systemicity, which are lacking in the earlier constructs. This paper posits that a scale including the concept of a system provides a new and rich description of people’s systemic skills both in different social situations and in different contexts. The scale is suggested to relate directly to the skills required in the LO. Method SI is assumed to be a multifactor construct that consists of aspects such as the ability to observe and adjust one’s own behavior, the ability to accurately observe and affect the behavior of others, and the abilities to find ways to improve the relevant systems both in the short term and in the long term. To capture all of these aspects, an inventory is generated consisting of a set of statements related to self, to other people, to ways of acting and reacting, and to the cognitive as well as emotional grasp of the relevant systems phenomena. In order to account for the possibility that SI skills may differ significantly between people in different life situations, occupations, and age groups, participants were gathered from three different contexts: university students, including an open course in Philosophy and Systems Thinking and Applied Mathematics courses; employees of a large engineering company participating in an employee training event; daycare workers and managers; and an open web questionnaire. The samples are detailed in Table 1. Table 1. Number of participants by sample and subsample Sample / Subsample N female male 1.Students 459 182 263 Philosophy and Systems Thinking 284 127 149 Applied Mathematics 175 55 114 2.Daycare personnel and managers 463 449 14 Daycare personnel 385 374 11 Daycare managers 78 75 3 3. Company employees and managers 293 135 149 4. Students (following year) 500 224 268 5. Open questionnaire in English 345 173 162 Study 1: Development of the SI inventory factor structure A list of SI-related items was iteratively worked down from an initial large set of phrases and questions that describe systems intelligent behavior. The list was refined in a series of small-scale tests, improving items that participants found too difficult, problematic, or ones that had very skewed answer distributions. This process resulted in a set of 76 pilot items. Two data sets were created for developing the factor structure after pooling samples 1-3 together: • A learning set (N=300), used for exploratory analysis, was formed by sampling 150 females and 150 males randomly among all participants. • A validation set (N=815) consisted of the complete answers of the remaining participants and was used to validate the factorial validity of the inventory via confirmatory factor analysis. Participants answered to the pilot items in Finnish with a 7-point Likert-type scale with the labels “never”, “very seldom”, “seldom”, “sometimes”, “often”, “very often” and “always”. In the analyses, the scale was converted to an integer scale of 0-6 respectively. The participants were allowed to leave answers to items empty. The questionnaires were administered over the internet. Participants did not get any compensation for completing the questionnaire. Participants’ SI factor scores were calculated as weighted averages of item responses, using the factor loadings from the confirmatory model. Relationship between SI and Emotional Intelligence The SI factor scores were associated with scores on Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1995; Salovey and Mayer, 1989) in a separate study with students (Sample 4 in Table 1). The participants answered 47 of the pilot items of the SI inventory in Finnish and the 33-item Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (Schutte et al., 1998), using a Finnish translation of the scale. The sample size was 500. The participants were motivated by participation in a lottery where 30 winners received two movie tickets each. The questionnaire also provided the participants a summary page that described their relative strengths and weaknesses in SI. Initial validation of the English language version of the inventory In addition to the large-scale studies presented above, an English version of the inventory was provided as an open, but not actively publicized web questionnaire. The questionnaire was publicly available on a website, and people were referred to it in a number of public lectures and company training events. There were 345 participants (Sample 5 in Table 1).