About the book
The book examines why so many attempts to make systems more productive and satisfying end up disappointing, and Barry Oshry proposes a new framework for dealing with human behavior. He traces breakdowns in organizations to people's blindness toward the human systems they belong to. His examples include top executive teams sliding into turf battles, improvement programs that set cooperative good workers against resistant bad ones, and marriages that seemed ideal coming apart. Oshry calls these patterns destructive dances. He then describes how productive partnerships form once people recognize such dances, stop them and create new ones built on mutual understanding and respect.
Mehdi Kajbaf, co-founder of Matboard and More, valued its analytical model for understanding any organizational system, an approach new to him, and its account of recurring group patterns and of overcoming what Oshry calls System Blindness.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Mehdi Kajbaf (Co-Founder/Matboard and More)
Seeing Systems takes a thoroughly analytical and rational approach to human systems and comes up with a model that can be used to understand all organizational systems. That’s incredibly powerful and I had not seen that approach before. Barry Oshry describes the patterns that repeat themselves in every business or large group, and helps us understand how to overcome what he calls System Blindness. This approach helped me step back and look at Matboard and More (my start up) in a new way. Instead of seeing issues between executives, middle management and frontline employees as personal issues I saw them as systemic ones. This fresh perspective has been amazingly effective!
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