Now that I know how to identify a system, I’m seeing them everywhere.
That’s the Instagram post. The longer version is that I’ve been seeing them my whole working life. Every job I’ve ever had, somebody was talking about, have we got the systems in place for this? Or, it’s an issue with the system… and while I got the general idea, and I could help fix the problem, cause everything we do at work is a system, right? I just didn’t know how to describe the parts of a system, so I never had a solid visual in my mind of what it was I was trying to fix.
The first time I was directly in charge of building systems was back in the early 2000s. Lemme just tell that story.
I was an ESOL tutor. I mostly did substitute work through an education employment agency, and it was the height of English-as-a-second-language learning in Auckland, so I was never without an assignment for several years. Assignments lasted months, sometimes a year or so.
One of them was teaching English to an ever-incoming stream of Cambodian students. I learned so much. For a start, I was the same age as most of them, or younger, and I was trying to be an authority figure for kids I could see myself clubbing with. I did, in fact. One of them became a really good friend, and when she married a Chinese businessman looking for opportunities in New Zealand, I went to the wedding. He met my parents there. My dad ran a Samoan newspaper at the time, and he had a master’s in history and political science and was a trained teacher as well. The two of them got talking.
Let’s start a private training establishment. We’ll bring in students from China and all over Asia.
Two visionaries, one problem: neither of them liked admin work very much. So my dad brought me in. “All you have to do is some paperwork so we can get NZQA approved, then we’ll get TEC funded and bring in international students.” I was still teaching full time, so I didn’t have a lot of capacity for it, but I gave it a go and filled out bits of paperwork as I could.
About six months into the compliance work, my dad died. He had a heart surgery that he didn’t quite wake up from.
We thought that was the end of it. The private training establishment was his dream, and the dream probably wasn’t going to happen now. But my dad and I had some personal issues just before he died, and I think the guilt of that, plus a reluctance to let go of something we’d worked so hard on already, pushed me back in. I reduced my ESOL hours and threw myself into finishing what he’d started.
The biggest task ahead of us was the quality assurance document. I was in my early 20s. I had no idea what that was, what it meant, or how to do it. Luckily NZQA assigned us a rep to support us through the process.
When I tell you how daunting this was… We had to map out every part of every system in an organisation that didn’t fully exist yet. NZQA gave us a template, and I had to take that template, imagine how it applied to us, and draft all the systems we had. Twenty-five-odd years later, I have a much better understanding of what the assignment was, what a system is. But back then it was like climbing a wall in the dark, and I’m not a climber.
Take one process. A student registers to take our course.
- What does that registration look like?
- What information are we gathering from them?
- How do we decide whether they’re accepted or not?
- Once they’re accepted, what does that mean for them?
- When do they start?
- Do we have a teacher in place?
- How many students are we allowing in?
That’s several little systems inside one little process, and that process was one of hundreds. Then every process had to be aligned with government policy around education and privacy. Yes, the Privacy Act was involved. Any student money that came in had to sit in a trust account we couldn’t touch until we’d delivered the service they’d paid for, so we had an account with Public Trust. Oh my gosh, it was so many things.
It took me a year and a half to feel like I had actually completed the document, and that was while we were setting up shop. We had a building leased, furniture, recruitment efforts outlined and ready to roll, so now I could at least compare every page in the doc to what we were doing on the ground. We submitted it once, it came back with feedback, I submitted it again, and it was approved. I usually tell people it was 800 pages. I think it was closer to a thousand. The first book I’d ever written.
(I can’t remember the exact compliance rules were, but you get the idea.)
Where am I going with this story?
When I look back at that time with my new systems-thinker lens on, I can see the one thing I wish I’d known: A system exists to achieve a purpose.
If I had started the quality assurance document with the purpose of the whole establishment securely defined, that one process for bringing in students would have written itself. If we’d said, out loud, that the purpose is to make sure students get a quality education and graduate with a qualification they can actually use, then I would have known we needed to
- pre-qualify them at registration
- check whether they had the prerequisite learning
- check whether they could pay, because the money coming in helps ensure the quality of the teaching
I would have known their qualification was assured by the government via NZQA, so every student who walked in the door needed to be registered in the NZQA system. All of that comes from purpose. I was trying to build a system with no real vision of what it was supposed to achieve.
The second lesson is almost as important. The elements inside a system have to interact in a way that achieves the purpose. Going back, I would have seen that the students, NZQA, me, my business partners, the building we met in, the chairs, the teachers we hired, are all elements. They needed to interact in a way that got students to graduate with a New Zealand qualification. Any interaction that wasn’t conducive to that end needed to be eliminated or adjusted. That’s what the NZQA template was actually asking me to check. I just didn’t have the words for it.
After the private training establishment I went on to other work. I eventually helped New Zealand Post’s National Contact Centre revise their systems to hit their goals, and then helped implement those systems by training the staff. I was working with systems every single day. I still didn’t have the terminology, not that knowing the words was necessary to get the job done. But understanding the machinery of a system, I could have been a lot more surgical about diagnosing and fixing it… and I’d have got there faster.
So this whole ramble is me advocating for knowing the words. Not for the impressive vocabulary, but because knowing the words means you know what it’s made of, and once you what all the parts are, you can be deliberate about working with them. Design a system on purpose instead of climbing the wall in the dark.
Lucky I know all that now.
