The Organisation as a System: What Happens Between the Parts?

Any small or large business has structure. The classic example is usually an org chart. Who reports to who, who has responsibility for what, who sits where.

An org chart is a bit like a skeleton.

It’s important. It gives the organisation structure. It tells us where the major components are, and how they’re connected.

But a skeleton on its own doesn’t do very much.

For that, we need oxygen, nutrition, circulation, energy, and all the other biological systems that keep the body functioning. The skeleton doesn’t operate independently of the kidneys, the lungs, the muscles, or the heart. They all depend on each other.

So which is the vital part of the body?

The skeleton can’t survive without the kidney, any more than the kidney can survive without the skeleton. And businesses aren’t really any different.

Which is the vital part of a business?

Sales, perhaps. Without sales, money doesn’t come in.

But without someone producing what you’re selling, there’s nothing to sell. Without finance, invoices don’t get sent and bills don’t get paid. Without operations, all those activities may happen, but not necessarily in a way that reliably produces a result.

Too often we just don’t see what happens between the individual parts of a team. Like air, sometimes the most important parts of life are invisible.

That’s also where business organisation can become particularly intimidating if you don’t come from a business background. The language itself can feel like something everyone else learned somewhere along the way.

Finance. Management. HR. Strategy. Sales. Operations.

We’re often taught these as separate subjects, and for good reason. It’s difficult to understand a complicated system without first understanding its components.

But knowing what each part does isn’t the same as understanding how the parts work together.

A business isn’t a collection of independent departments. It’s a system of people, processes, information, resources and decisions, all affecting each other. Change one part, and something somewhere else may change too.

Increase sales without increasing capacity, and production or customer service may become overloaded. Reduce costs in one area, and you may simply move the cost somewhere else.

Change a process without telling the people who depend on it, and suddenly you’re spending time working around the new system rather than working within it.

And sometimes the problem appears in one part of the organisation even though the cause is somewhere else.

That’s not particularly unusual in biology. An organism under excessive strain doesn’t necessarily announce, “the system is overloaded.” Something starts to malfunction. In medicine, we call problems “symptoms”, but the underlying principle is the same. Something hurts. Something fails. Something signals that all is not well.

The same can happen in organisations.

People become overloaded. Information stops flowing. Decisions get delayed. Customers start experiencing inconsistencies. Teams develop workarounds. Eventually, someone calls this a “pain point.”

And that “pain point” is simply where the system is showing its symptoms.

This is why operations is about more than processes and efficiency.

It’s about understanding how the different parts of an organisation interact, where information and resources need to flow, what creates unnecessary load, and how the system responds when the environment changes. Because an organisation doesn’t operate in isolation either.

Customers change. Markets change. Suppliers change. Regulations change. People change.

A healthy system has to respond.

An organisation isn’t a wind-up clock, where you set everything in motion and expect it to keep ticking indefinitely. And it isn’t a collection of isolated parts that can each be optimised independently.

It’s a system. And it’s more of a biological system than people recognize.

And if the parts and people are working in isolation, working around the system (if there is one!) rather than working within a system, that’s probably an operations problem.

If you’d like help making things work more smoothly, get in touch.