Archetypes Case

Balancing Process with Delay:

Description: an organization, a group or a person, acting towards a goal, adjusts their behavior in response to delayed feedback. One has to be aware of the delay, otherwise more actions are required to correct the same problem. Sometimes - progress made cannot be seen.

Management Principle: In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Organization, group or person has to be patience or make system more responsive.

Business Story: Real estate market: developers /builders kept building new properties without having enough buyers in sluggish market. There are plenty of properties available in the market and having enough additional properties still under construction, resulting in a glut.

Limit to growth:

Description: A process feeds on itself to produce a period of an exponential growth or expansion. Growth begins to slow and comes to a halt, and may even reverse itself and begin to collapse quickly.

The growth phase can be caused by reinforcing the feedback process(es). The slowing arises due to a balancing process that came to play as a "limit" is approached. The limit can be a resource constraint or external or internal response to growth.

Management Principle: Don't push growth -remove the factors limiting growth.

Business Story: New Startup Company that grows rapidly until it's reaches a size when more professional management skills and a formal organization is needed. So the company with a new product team that worked until it's success caused it to bring in new employees with new work style, and different values than the founding members -leading it to limit the growth.

Shifting the Burden:

Shifting the Burden Systems Archetype shows how attacking symptoms, rather than identifying and fixing fundamental problems, can lead to a further dependence on symptomatic solutions. The problems can be difficult to address -may not be cost effective or time effective, therefore burden gets shifted to other quick fix solutions. So easier and quicker solutions only ameliorate the symptoms leaving the underlying problem diseased. The unaltered problem grows worse than the solution itself.

In this archetype, fundamental, long-term actions for reform are neglected in favor of those with more immediate, and probably ephemeral, results.

Management Principle: The easy way out usually leads back in.

Solutions that address only the symptoms of a problem and not the root of the problem -gives only short term benefits. In the long term, the problem resurfaces and there is an increased pressure for symptomatic response.

Business Story: Taking pain relievers to address chronic pain rather than visiting your doctor to try to address the underlying problem.

Borrowing money to cover uncontrolled spending.

Outsourcing core business competencies rather than building internal capacity.

Implementing government programs that increase the recipient's dependency on the government, e.g., welfare programs that do not attempt to simultaneously address low unemployment or low wages (also shifting the burden to the intervener, in this case, to the government)

Shifting the burden to the Intervenor:

Description: The phenomenon of short term improvements using the intervenors leads to a long term dependency on the intervenor. Intervenors can be federal assistance to cities, or welfare programs. Shifting the burden to intervenors only makes the system weaker than before and more in need of further help.

Management Principle: Teach people to fish rather then just giving them fish.

Focus on enhancing the capabilities of the host system to solve its own problem. Help should be provided to learn and develop their own skills to support and solve the needs and problems, rather than to provide the help to solve the problem

The cure can be worse than the disease.

Business story: Outsourcing core business competencies rather than building internal capacity and shifting the burden to the intervener, in this case, to the outsource provider.

Deportation of illegal immigrant field workers

Take away extended families and shift the burden for care of the elders to nursing homes.

Eroding Goals:

Description: A shifting the burden type of structure in which focus is on a short term goal rather than a long term goal. So much so, the focus is given on short term goal that long term fundamental goal declines -- making it eroding goals.

Management Principle: Hold the vision.

Business story: Lowered government targets for "full employment"