- [Narrator] Today we're gonna look

at how we can see organizations as systems.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy and J.G. Miller

established the foundations

of General Systems Theory

in the 1960s and 1970s.

And researchers in the Organizational Studies area

imported the systems metaphor

of the living biological organism

and the key terms that go along with it

to pursue a richer understanding

of how organizations worked.

In 1966, for example, Daniel Katz

and Robert Kahn published

The Social Psychology of Organizations

that applied systems theory's concepts

to organizational life.

I think it's most helpful to see systems

as an alternative perspective at the time.

Classical management era of organizational studies

was really the dominant view

and it saw organizations as machines

and that was the main way to view

life in organizations for many decades.

The goal of that classical management

school of thought was they wanted efficiency,

productivity and control.

They were looking for the one right way

or, as Frederick Taylor said,

the one best way to do every single task

in the organization.

And so when systems theory came along

it was really a whole another way

to view life at work.

A systems approach looks at the whole organism,

not the little pieces of the machine,

but how it all fits together as a whole.

So, the goal of the systems approach

is to describe and explain