Ethics by Design: Strategic Thinking and Planning for Exemplary Performance, Responsible Results, and Societal Accountability

The Social Contract 15

often get lost in processes and lose sight of the outcomes they

deliver to society. When those failures to deliver results occur,

we hear about them in the evening news.

System Thinking—Adding Value to the Whole

Doing the right things is a very external focus, while doing

things right is a very internal focus. Organizations get lost in

processes (and fail to deliver results) when they lose sight of

the world around them and their external clients, be those cli-

ents consumers, families, children, elders, or the country

depending on you to keep it secure. To focus on doing the right

things and even think in terms of measuring socially responsi-

ble behavior, we have to first understand why society—not our

organizations—is the starting point for strategic planning.

The days of thinking of an organization or institution in iso-

lation from all other institutions and from society are long

past.

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Many do still operate this way, but that’s a business

model that will be short-lived. A brief boom in profit or ratings

does not mean a business or organization is functioning in a

way that will sustain continued success. Even though the

“short-term” forecasts and outlooks are the standard, common

models for many organizations, they are by no means the most

accurate or reliable. A company with a large profit one year

may very well be out of existence the next year without truly

strategic planning towards socially desirable results.

We have come to understand our world—in a variety of dis-

ciplines, from physics and the natural sciences to the social

sciences—as interconnected and interrelated. A change or

action in one place has ripple effects into other places. This is

the systemic way of thinking. It should not be confused with

systematic, which means to follow a clearly defined process.

Instead, system thinking views the parts as part of a whole—

what happens in one part affects other parts and, therefore,

affects the whole.

An important distinction is in order. The absence of the “s”

at the end of “system” is not a typo. Much of this stems from

General System Theory originally articulated by von Bertalanffy.

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General System Theory has become an important paradigm