Recently I ran across this statement coined by Stafford Beer, a British theorist at the Manchester Business School:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I think I know a lot of people who would be very troubled by this statement. It's so... blunt. If a system does a thing, then that's the purpose of the system. Alternatively, if a system doesn't do a thing, that isn't the purpose of the system.

Dissecting the hot take

Why would they find this statement so troubling? Well, when you say that "the purpose of the system is what it does", you're discarding intent as a valid criterion for evaluating something and strictly focusing on outcomes. Well... as it turns out, we humans are naturally inclined to evaluate our actions based on intent. This is rooted in a psychological need to preserve self-esteem and justify efforts. Even if something that we worked on doesn't work, we pacify ourselves with the thought that "we tried hard"... "we wanted to improve it"... our intentions were good, so we still did well!

The problem is that the OUTCOME doesn't care about your intentions. If the goal was to reduce costs by 25% but the change increased costs by 25% instead, it doesn't actually matter that you were "trying to reduce them". You didn't DO it. It's right there, in black & white.

And that brings us back to the purpose of a System...

What does your system DO?

Proceeding from the statement of purpose, we find that this is what we want to ask... what exactly does our system do?

Some of you might be tempted to pull out diagrams or other planning documents to explain "what it's supposed to do".

You'd be wrong. Because...

The Purpose of a System is What it Does

When we're talking about what it actually does... your plans and intentions don't matter!

A Practical Example

Let's say we support an application system. We've implemented observability tooling to keep an eye on how it's running... BUT let's say that we've misconfigured our alerting policies, and the application is generating false-positive high-priority support tickets multiple times per hour.

What is the purpose of these monitoring systems?

If we pull out our plans and intentions to answer this question, we're forced to conclude that this is an absolutely critical component that cannot be deactivated because we might miss an alert that was correct!

However... let's use our new mantra to reconsider the situation.

If the purpose of the system is merely what it does, then what we have is a system that generates faulty alerts and shows no utility. We can easily conclude that because the system is producing frequent false-positive alerts, it cannot be trusted and must be deactivated until it is functioning in a useful fashion.

Which of these perspectives do you think your Support Operations team would prefer? I can tell you without a doubt, the first approach will destroy morale and cause friction. The second will empower the team to take a malfunctioning, useless system offline and effect repairs.

Extrapolating to Corporate Culture

I believe this concept can explain why many company cultural initiatives struggle, or even fail.

If we apply the proverb to the entire organization, we find that our company - its hierarchical structure, its policies and procedures, even its culture - has a purpose... and that purpose is what. It. Does.

So when we attempt to initiate culture change, we're changing our intents... but we often neglect to consider that the system's purpose isn't wrapped up in fancy sayings or focus groups... it's found it what the system does.

Imagine that we rewrite our company values, and one of them is "Treat everyone with Dignity and Respect". That seems admirable... even enticing, doesn't it? But if I show up in a meeting and watch people playing political cut-throat hardball with their colleagues... the incongruity between our plans (the Values statements) and our reality (ruthless manipulation) is obvious. And using Dr. Beer's axiom, we find that the Purpose of our Organization cannot be to Treat everyone with Dignity and Respect!

Is it hopeless, then?

Do we resign to the fate of the system... that its purpose is immutable, established in the stars and we have no hope of changing anything?

Absolutely not! It's just that we can't expect to make some grandiose plans and watch our culture change. We have to address what the system does. It's about establishing authenticity between what we say and what we do.

Wrapping up

It's a very simple statement:

The Purpose of a System is What it Does.

But it requires a degree of intellectual honesty that we might never have explored before. It's not an easy road, but it's extremely rewarding.

Coming up next

If you're one of the folks who's been reading the Adventures of Blink regularly,

Thank you.

I hope you're learning, and growing, and thinking with me... it's why I do what I do!

I'm going to take a couple weeks off regular posting now - I've been on a sprint for more than 20 weeks, and it's time to get a breather. Don't worry, I'll be back soon - The Adventures of Blink don't end here!