The Liberators Podcast

In-Depth: What a Social Systems Perspective Teaches us About Change

September 04, 2020 The Liberators Season 1 Episode 52
The Liberators Podcast
In-Depth: What a Social Systems Perspective Teaches us About Change
Show Notes

"Teams make people more than people make teams."

It may be a bold statement, but there is a surprising amount of scientific evidence that shows the overwhelming effect of our social environment on our behavior and performance. By understanding why it is easier to understand what makes change so difficult.

In this episode of our podcast, we explore a different way to understand organizations. Rather than the dominant perspective today - to understand them as "machines" - we look at organizations as social systems. We draw from five domains of scientific research to show just how useful this perspective is, what it teaches us about change and how we can do better.

This episode is part of our "In-depth"-series; a series that doesn't offer easy answers but aims to create deeper understanding. Our hope is this makes it easier to come up with your own answers, rather than having to rely on experts and consultants to tell you.

This episode is based on this blog post (which includes all the references too):
https://bit.ly/3lfEx4T

Donate to support our work:
https://bit.ly/supportheliberators

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https://medium.com/the-liberators

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Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.