The potatoes I now have to go home and throw out from our freezer are just one item among a long list of consumer goods that have been recalled over the past year due to the presence of bacteria or chemicals that could be harmful if ingested.  Many will remember the toys recalled due to lead paint being used in the process.  Baby bottles have been recalled, peanuts and peanut products recalled with plants shut down.  Topps Beef in Elizabethtown, NJ had to close its doors for good because a recall of ground beef (due to E. coli) became so large the company simply couldn't overcome that inertia.

In truth, planning for societal-level outcomes - such as "no consumer will get sick or die as a result of eating or purchasing our product" - isn't just about feel-good social responsibility.  Social responsibility, at its core, is about external consequences of the things your organization does, produces and delivers into society.  Organizations (of all types, be they military, educational, non-profit or for-profit) don't operate in a vacuum.  And yet, traditional planning models reflect a "vacuum mentality" - that somehow results and impact stop at the walls of your organization (i.e. with profits or ratings or votes).   Nothing could be further from the truth ... arguably the truth that keeps journalists and media in business (or at least very busy reporting).  When organizations fail at the societal level, there are direct consequences - people get sick or die, are injured, get caught in wars or riots, face discrimination, and so forth.  Organizations can plan for desired impact, though.

William McDonough, a reknowned architect who works on designs that have positive environmental impacts, points out that we have become "strategically tragic" as a society.  Because of these traditional planning models, many organizations plan as though they are in a vacuum ... with tragic consequences - for society, for the environment, and for the economy.  It's a form of "de facto" planning - these negative things happen because we simply don't bother to plan for it to be otherwise.

The MegaPlanning model starts by assuming impact on society and details how to plan for desired impact on societal level measures.  That level of planning then gets aligned down into the bowels of an organization.  Imagine with me, for a second, if you will, how different the year in the news for 2008 would have been had a host of organizations taken this approach.  Had a food producer articulated a precise objective, like I just did, that "No consumer will get sick or die as a result of eating or purchasing our product, as indicated by results from CDC and recalls issued of our products" ... this sort of objective would then be aligned down into the processes of a plant or packaging or purchasing end of business to ensure that the decisions at those levels in the organization didn't lead to failure of this top-level objective.  Had a bank adopted the objective that no individual shall be rendered unable to be self-sufficient as a result of lending practices, then that sort of top-level objective in financial institutions could have led to far more sound decision making about just what products to make available on the market.

Without these types of top-level, societally-focused objectives, we accept de facto planning.  We become strategically tragic.  We become literally tragic.

With a whole world full of evidence that traditional models of organizational planning have failed us, now is as good a time as any to step back and question our planning models.  We can bury our collective heads in the sand, or we can screw up our courage and accept that we design our own futures ... so it's simply time to get purposeful in our planning and in how we shape the world we live.

I have attended many presentations, both at ISPI and other conferences, where the talks promise to be about systemic approaches, or where the authors accurately identify their focus as "systematic" in the beginning, but somewhere through the presentation, magically "systemically" and "systematically" start swapping out with each other in the language, like synonymous butterflies that flutter in and out of the same place in a sentence.  I have just finished reviewing a round of presentation proposals in which these two words continue to battle with each other.  Even though they have very similar letters, in a very similar sequence, they are so different in meaning so as to nearly run perpendicular in definition.  And yet, these two concepts are at the core of the principles of professional performance improvement practices (did I string enough big words together there?).

Ryan just posted on the language of performance.  As a student of language and rhetoric, I find it interesting that the first two blog topics to roll from us are on language.  At the core of language is thought - our language both reflects our thinking and creates our thinking.  Lack of rigor in our language is indicative as lack of rigor in our conceptualization of our professional practices.  Given that, getting clear on what the heck we mean when we say "performance" or "systemic" or "systematic" - since these are the core words of our very principles - is critical. 

So - let's wrest systemic from the dependably mundane systematic. More...