Organizations are systems as well, and they're complex and
they have interdependent parts.
So, for instance the distinct parts that are interdependent and
form a complex whole are things like the ambulance services.
Alone, they don't do anything.
They do but they are not going to build or run a hospital by themselves.
And also the tools and equipment that are needed, and the people that are needed.
All of these different components that are necessary.
Now, the idea of inputs would be sick patients.
So here we have a person who is ill and comes in to receive care.
So that's our input.
But throughput would be the care actually received.
So the patient meets with the doctor who says, hey you have a broken arm and
we need to put it into a cast.
And the output then is after the cast is on,
we have a healed patient who is much happier.
So where does the feedback come in?
So this is very similar to the body that we talked about before.
Well the feedback is that we need to be responsive to the environment and so
perhaps there's new legislation about how we give care to patients.
And remember that there's also internal feedback as well in organizations.
You have to listen to your employees, and in the case the doctor says,
hey I need better equipment to do my job.
Or maybe the patient on the external side again says, you know,
I just think that, this hospital's too expensive, I can't afford it.
And so if we don't listen to our internal environment, our doctor's will leave.
If we don't listen to the external environment,
we won't have any more patients anyway.
So then how can we apply these concepts to the course?
Well every organization we're talking about is an open system, so
we can check that off of our list.
And the second thing is that we have distinct parts that make a complex whole.
In every organization you work in, I'm sure you have many different departments
that all affect how many people need to be hired.
And so we have all of the people within our organization, if, for
instance someone sells a lot to a customer or
we have some really big orders, maybe we need to staff more people.
Systems have inputs, throughputs and outputs.
So if you think about that we've got all different systems that we're bringing in
people through recruiting process, we're interviewing them and then we hire.
Feedback from the environment is necessary,
we need to pay attention to what's happening to the economy.
We can't go and hire a whole bunch of people if the economy is not
doing very well and we have to pay attention what our competitors are paying.
So we really need to pay attention to that extra non-environment.
So what are some key to takeaways that you can think about?
[MUSIC]