System Thinking and My Work as a Diplomat
System thinking is a process of understanding how different components influence a larger system and how the system interacts with its environment. How can I apply it in my work as a diplomat?
I fell in love with system perspective since I was in college. It were Anthony Gidden’s Structuration Theory and Talcott Parsons’ Structural Functionalism Theory that first piqued my interest. I studied Communication Science and I learnt about those theories in the Organizational Communication class.
An organization is a smaller part of a society, thus it has some features that resemble how a society works. So, before learning about organizational communication theory, we were taught about theories of Sociology, such as Structuration and Structural Functionalism Theory, as a foundation for us to understand about how an organisation operates. From there, I began to lean on system perspective and learn more about it.
Let me begin with the classic theory of system perspective which is Structuration and Structural Functionalism Theory. As I mentioned before, those are theories from Sociology which are important for us in order to understand the nature of organisation in theory. Structuration theory is a concept which individualism plays an important role in larger system. It is what makes a society or organisation can be distinguished from the others. But for some people, the explanation was not enough. Then, Parsons came up with Structural Functionalism theory which is about social structure or organisation in society which is more prominent than an individual. The interaction between organisation and individual will create a dynamic inside a society.
But those two theories could not explain some phenomena in a modern organisation. Thus, a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann created a system theory that is known as Luhmann’s System Theory. He introduced a concept called autopoetic and double contingency which mimicks the process in a biological system and applies it into a social system. And me, until now, still being in love with Luhmann’s theory and concept which so vast.
Then, what is the relations between system theories and my work as a diplomat? The complexity of the work in diplomacy field lies on the actors and counterparts that involved in the practice. It really gives me a headache. System perspective and theory come as a solution in order to understand complexity and simplify it. But, if we don’t understand the problem really well, it will make things even more complicated.
In this way, I need to identify the problem clearly using system perspective and divide everything into a smaller system. The process can involve a method called ontology which is a method of understanding why something exist or being that way. But, we won’t discuss about it here. Then why do I mention it? Because in order to be able to divide things into smaller components, we need to understand the nature of each components. That’s how ontology will be very useful.
Back to system perspective, then we continue to apply a system theory that will help us to understand the system of a whole organisation. We can choose structuration, functionalism, or Luhmann’s theory in order to explain things. It depends on the problem and nature of the organisation. And one thing that we should know, system theory is a grand theory. It means there are a lot of middle-range and micro theory based on system theory. You can choose to use a grand theory or smaller one based on the problems you want to solve and your organisation characteristic.
Well, it looks like I talk a lot about organisation. But, diplomacy is not all about organisation. We can change the word ‘organisation’ to ‘diplomacy economy’ or anything that will be your ‘environment’. The problem is sometime the concept of diplomacy practices are so abstract that I have no idea what I am talking about and I can’t identify it as a system or not. For instances, when I think about soft diplomacy, I think about the mechanism, the agency, and the communication between actors. I can’t fathom the mere concept of soft diplomacy as a system, so I try to understand it in a marketing and IR perspective. Using system perspective, I try to identify which part is from marketing and the one from IR. But, it is so complex and it ends up with me being so bewildered by my own thought.
Well, I don’t know if my knowledge in system perspective will be useful in my current job, but at least it gives me a lot of fun. I found most people find a system perspective as a very complex theory and impractical. So, I don’t try to change what people think about the way we should see diplomacy from system perspective. I only wish that I could understand what I am doing better because it is the only way I could work more effectively even if sometimes it just makes everything more complicated. But, as a diplomat, sometimes you need to make something looks more complex than the reality in order to confuse people or persuade certain subject in order to get what you want. Sometime, it can be called as being ‘diplomatic’.
