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Thoughts on "system building" in organisations: it is by definition what makes an organisation more than the sum of its individual parts... yet conscious system building is bizarrely rare.
Reams of literature about people and motivation and leadership.... far less about systems building. I'd hazard that "management" is largely understood as "people management" and not the main leverage/value creation: "systems design and implementation"
Note: "business systems designer" is not a career or job title. Even though that is (a) what most businesses need, and (b) THE defining characteristic of orgs with high growth, high scalability, high resilience, high value etc
Consider "projects". In theory a project is to put something in place which transitions into BAU. How many initiatives or projects in your organisation are actually overtly understood as being about building a system?
People who think and speak in terms of systems are typically characterised as "analytical" and their ideas derided as "theoretical". In fact, systems creators are higher-order *imaginative creators*.
Systems creation is not the same as organisation design and structures. These are just tools/aspects of systems. If your org chart is not designed with over-arching systems (and it probably isn't) then it is probably a structural antipattern holding back your entire org.
Systems bring "transparency" and "accountability". Here we get a clue to why system creators encounter passive aggressive resistance inside organisations.
The system-building view of an organisation is the opposite of rigidity. By understanding, separating out, seeing causalities, gaps, variables... you gain command of specific things to change. You see what is flexible, scalable... and what is not.
The system-building view should also be perfectly tolerant to things arising or done in an "incorrect" or non-system way. It is very significant just for an organisation to know whether something is being done to-system or not. In your org, can you say which is which?
