Jun 1, 2026 · 47 min · 14 segments
Send us Fan Mail What if the thing holding you and your organisation back isn't a market problem, a resource problem, or even a people problem — but…
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Angela MontgomeryGuest
Gerry MurrayHost
So you've been helping organizations, you've been referring to it now a few times, that you've been helping organizations, uh, adopt, adopt a systemic approach since the mid-'90s, but when you look at the challenge of leading people today, what do you think leaders still most often misunderstand when they treat, treat organizations as separate parts rather than an interconnected whole?
Well, the fact is, uh, Gerry, that today we live in a world of complexity.
Um, scientifically, it means that we live within a level of interdependencies that n- has never existed before, and we experience that in our everyday life.
So we are all interconnected, and we live it through the internet, we live it through international trade, uh, we live it through, sadly, international conflict.
Um, all these things, uh, demonstrate to us on a daily basis how interconnected we now are.
Um, that was not the case 100 years ago, and yet so many organizations are still organized, and they're still managing themselves as if they were 100 years ago.
So we still have so often the top-down hierarchy, the company divided, divided up into business functions, which inevitably leads to silos, but the intrinsic nature of work in any organization is a flow.
So if you introduce business functions, if you have silos, that flow just keeps getting interrupted, and the performance of the whole organization is sub-optimized.
So for leadership, the implications are, are huge, um, because we need to understand that to lead today, we must see and understand the organization the way Dr. Deming taught us back in the 1950s as a, a, a network of inter- interdependent components that work together to achieve a goal.
Now, when we have that understanding, then it doesn't make sense anymore to think of top-down hierarchies or leadership as anything to do with control.
Uh, leadership is to do with guiding the interactions of the company in the best possible way to achieve a common goal.
So, um-In fact, Dr. Deming said that a leader is somebody who has a theory and, uh, a vision, and their job is to communicate that theory and vision and so that people can execute on it.
And when we say theory, that is something that in the, uh, Anglo-Saxon world has a very...
Um, Einstein said, "There is nothing as practical as a good theory." If we don't have a theory behind what we're doing, we don't know what we're doing [laughs] basically, right?
So, so the leader's job is to have that very clearly in mind, but I would say also today, they...
It's not about superimposing some trendy idea or some fluffy idea, "Oh, we're all connected." It's l- about understanding that, um, any organization is a system, is a network.
So you've been helping organizations, you've been referring to it now a few times, that you've been helping organizations, uh, adopt, adopt a systemic approach since the mid-'90s, but when you look at the challenge of leading people today, what do you think leaders still most often misunderstand when they treat, treat organizations as separate parts rather than an interconnected whole?
Well, the fact is, uh, Gerry, that today we live in a world of complexity.
Um, scientifically, it means that we live within a level of interdependencies that n- has never existed before, and we experience that in our everyday life.
So we are all interconnected, and we live it through the internet, we live it through international trade, uh, we live it through, sadly, international conflict.
Um, all these things, uh, demonstrate to us on a daily basis how interconnected we now are.
Um, that was not the case 100 years ago, and yet so many organizations are still organized, and they're still managing themselves as if they were 100 years ago.
So we still have so often the top-down hierarchy, the company divided, divided up into business functions, which inevitably leads to silos, but the intrinsic nature of work in any organization is a flow.
So if you introduce business functions, if you have silos, that flow just keeps getting interrupted, and the performance of the whole organization is sub-optimized.
So for leadership, the implications are, are huge, um, because we need to understand that to lead today, we must see and understand the organization the way Dr. Deming taught us back in the 1950s as a, a, a network of inter- interdependent components that work together to achieve a goal.
Now, when we have that understanding, then it doesn't make sense anymore to think of top-down hierarchies or leadership as anything to do with control.
Uh, leadership is to do with guiding the interactions of the company in the best possible way to achieve a common goal.
So, um-In fact, Dr. Deming said that a leader is somebody who has a theory and, uh, a vision, and their job is to communicate that theory and vision and so that people can execute on it.
And when we say theory, that is something that in the, uh, Anglo-Saxon world has a very...
Um, Einstein said, "There is nothing as practical as a good theory." If we don't have a theory behind what we're doing, we don't know what we're doing [laughs] basically, right?
So, so the leader's job is to have that very clearly in mind, but I would say also today, they...
It's not about superimposing some trendy idea or some fluffy idea, "Oh, we're all connected." It's l- about understanding that, um, any organization is a system, is a network.
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