Systemic Intelligence: the emerging competence 4.0. in work teams.
By: Noemi Viedma
Tags: Systemic Approach, Systemic Inteligence, Systems Thinking, Teams And Teamwork, Leadership Skills

Today, work teams are consolidating as a cornerstone for our organizations. In this sense, individual performance is necessary but not sufficient to guarantee success in companies. The focus should be more on teams as an organizational unit. Understanding what a team is, how it works, what challenges it faces is therefore key for our organizations. It requires new and different skills not only for those who have to lead them, but also for all the professionals who are part of the teams.

The regular leadership programs, coaching and team development programs offered in the market give already a response to these new skills. Purpose, results, organization of the task, climate, trust, culture and communication, among others, are essential topics to consider when we talk about teams. Recently, with the incorporation of the systemic approach, it is also becoming more common to look at the invisible dynamics that regulate energy. These dynamics operate as a continuous ‘background program’ and determine a big part of the functioning and performance of organizations.

The systemic approach looks at teams as living systems with basic needs common to all systems. We are talking here about the need to be complete and include everything that belongs, the need to observe an intrinsic order according to the nature and purpose of the system, the need to be in a dynamic relationship of exchange and the need to reach its destination, to survive in order to unfold into what has to be. When these basic needs are not balanced, they’ll generate compensatory functional patterns which are manifested as ‘symptoms’ in the visible part of ‘the iceberg’. Problems, conflicts, lack of performance or unwanted results can be symptomatic expressions of these underlying compensatory mechanisms. Perceiving them, identifying them and knowing how to intervene on them without just ’managing the symptom’ is, without a doubt, an essential emerging competence.

But I believe that this is not enough either. The focus should not be limited only inwards but also outwards. All of us simultaneously are a part of many contexts with large ranges of diversity between them. Our context “team” or our context “organization” is nested in larger contexts, which influence us and which we inevitably influence as well. This means that the invisible dynamics that often unconsciously determine our behaviour at work , could come from other contexts to which we belong and we might not be aware of.

We are simultaneously a whole and a part: an autonomous unit and, at the same time, an element that is part of a larger context. So something that happens and impacts us here and now in this team can be perceived and analyzed from different contexts or to put it in a systemic way: from different conscience levels. There will be a different storyline if a person or a team talks about what is going on from a “me or we” position (the conscience of unit), or an explanation of from the perspective of “part of a bigger whole”. In that case the same event could be a conscious or unconscious contribution to a higher agenda, playing a role in a bigger move, where others are involved or even are co creators (the collective conscience or system conscience). Finally, from a dettached, distanced, wide and evolutionary witnessing position, there would be an ultimate integrating and all-encompassing narrative that would give everything a reason of being (the conscience of evolution or evolutionary force conscience).

Identifying these higher invisible dynamics and having the capacity to perceive and explain what is happening from multiple perspectives is what I understand as systemic intelligence. In my opinion this is the key and radically fundamental competence to go along with the future that has already reached us. Integrating and developing it in our teams and organizations is an ‘must’ to be able to evolve.