I wrote about systems and process in one of my books and now realise that I didn’t quite fully understand the difference between systems and processes and why that difference is important. This post is my thought process on developing that understanding further.
Our school is a system because it is made up of components and most importantly, that is people. Any system has a number of sub systems. If we think of the people in our school system, we’ve got:
- School leaders
- Teaching staff
- Support staff
- Children
- Parents
Each of these sub systems has further sub systems that leaders have created in order to impose order. Take teaching staff:
- Foundation stage teachers
- Year 1 teachers
- Year 2 teachers
- The PE department
- The inclusion team
There are other ways that leaders impose order though that go beyond teachers’ year group or specialism. Another sub system might be based on areas of responsibility:
- Those planning English for their team
- Those planning maths for their team
It is a mistake to think that we can fully impose order on such a complex system. There will be other sub systems (of people) that have self organised based on the agency of the individuals. Take teachers again:
- Friendship groups
- Groups that pursue a common hobby or pastime together
- Social groups, for example due to having children of the same age / interests
Why is this distention between leader organised and self organised sub systems important? First, it is a way for leaders to appreciate complexity. A complex system such as a school cannot be defined simply by its components because those components (in this case people) interact and are changed by those interactions. There is no simple cause and effect relationship in schools.
Second, it is a way of further understanding culture. We might try and design a whole school culture but the reality is that there will be multiple sub cultures because of the sub systems that have been organised by leaders or that have self organised by the agency of the people. Describing the entirety of the school system is unlikely to be accurate as it is almost certain that different people experience the school differently because of who they spend most of their time with – which sub system they are part of. And when we or external visitors comment on the culture of the school, it is based on an emergent sub system of the people that we have interacted with and the information that they have chosen to reveal. For example, an inspector may speak to leaders and some staff and make inferences about culture based on what they have seen and heard. Or a Headteacher may base their understanding of school culture on the sub system that they have organised (or that has self organised) – the people that they spend most time with.Can you really talk about school as a whole having a culture? I think superficially, yes. Most likely shared beliefs and a shared language. But how that manifests will certainly be different for different individuals.
Systems or processes?
The whole school system and its sub systems have components other than people too. The people in each sub system have content that they are working with – namely the curriculum. Now the curriculum itself is probably not complex but complicated; the parts (different subjects, units of work, objectives etc) are interconnected but do not interact with each other. It is people that interact with the curriculum, changing it (through curriculum adaptation) and being changed by thinking about it and teaching it.
In #ImpactBook, I didn’t differentiate between systems and process and along with curriculum, lumped in assessment, quality assurance, behaviour and professional development. I now see those as processes; what makes the systems function or the work that those in the system carry out. This of course adds massively to the complexity of school because it provides multiple opportunities for the agents (people) to interact; multiple opportunities for unpredictability, compounded consequences and further self organisation. These broad organising concepts contain an incredible number of processes; let’s take assessment as an example:
- How teachers assess minute by minute and act on that information
- Designing and setting assessment tasks / tests
- Adminsitering assessment tasks / tests
- Assessing those tasks / tests
- Assigning some sort of grade to the task / test
- Compiling that information in a spreadsheet somewhere
- Designing statements by which teachers can make overall judgements of attainment / progress
- Moderating those judgements
- Analysing aggregated data to find strengths and areas to work on
- Some sort of pupil progress meeting for teachers and leaders to interact with the information and plan next steps
Do we need processes for tall these things? Absolutely. Designing, implementing and refining such systems provides structure; not so much organising the people but organising the work. But because they are how the systems operate, simply by engaging in these processes, the people change them and are changed by carrying them out. Some processes are inefficient, leading to increased workload which can have other compounding consequences throughout the system. Some processes might perhaps be unnecessary, contributing to a feeling of lack of purpose. Some processes might be starkly missing, contributing to a feeling of chaos. Well designed processes might be another way of bringing order to the complex system of school but we cannot impose complete order because the interaction between people and of people with our processes will always have an element of unpredictability.
Emergence
Because of those innumerable and unpredictable actions, we’ll see emergence in the complex system of school and its sub systems. Jochen Fromm puts this beautifully:
One water molecule is not fluid.
One gold atom is not metallic.
One neuron is not conscious.
One amino acid is not alive.
The meaning formed in children’s minds, and indeed in colleagues’ minds that result from our processes and the complex interactions between people are wonderful forms of emergence. We may have clear ideas of what we want children to learn and how we want teachers to teach but, in the style of Fromm, one headteacher is not a school. We must understand the inevitability of emergence and ride its wave. We do what we can to bring organisation to our complex school environment whilst also noticing how it organises itself. We do what we can to set up processes for how the school should run whilst also encouraging the evolution of those processes.
MrNickHart 