Seeing Your Company as a System

At first glance, a company looks like a set of departments, processes, and people. But in reality, it’s something much more dynamic: a complex adaptive system. Small issues can snowball into major problems, teams often optimize for themselves instead of the whole, and patterns repeat endlessly if leaders can’t see the bigger picture.

This isn’t abstract. Every organization struggles with functional tensions and vicious cycles that block real change. The costs are high: projects need to be redone, launches are delayed, and opportunities slip away. Analysts confirm the scale: McKinsey and Gartner report that 7 in 10 enterprises fail to realize shareholder benefits from digital and data transformations. The minority who succeed, those who invest in rewiring the enterprise, outperform laggards by 2x to 6x in equity gains.

This is a systemic problem, and it requires a systemic solution.

Purpose: Why the Company Exists

Every system has a purpose. For companies, that usually means profitability, but also delivering products and services customers value.

Purpose can be:

  • Internal (e.g., raising capital, hitting growth targets).

  • External (e.g., creating great chocolate, or delighting e-commerce customers).

  • Clear or fuzzy, planned or emergent.

The most important point: the actual output always reveals the true purpose. What a company produces and delivers is what it’s really organized around, regardless of its mission statement.

Inputs: What the Company Draws From Its Environment

To achieve its purpose, the company pulls in resources from the outside:

  • Money from customers, investors or banks.

  • People and their skills.

  • Information about customers, competition, and market forces.

  • Infrastructure and materials to make products or services.

Depending on how you set the “system boundary,” the environment could mean the economy, the industry, or just the immediate market.

Flows: How Work and Resources Move

Inputs flow through the company as work, decisions, and transactions. These flows aren’t simple, they have attributes that determine their performance:

  • Delay: how long it takes to see results. Long delays between trigger and result often create vicious cycles.

  • Directionality: one-way or feedback loops.

  • Consistency: clear and steady vs noisy and sporadic.

  • Continuity: smooth vs stop-and-go.

  • Velocity & volume: speed and quantity matter, but they’re not the same.

For example: hiring six people over a year looks very different than hiring six hundred in a quarter.

Importantly, these flows don’t just move between the company and its environment. They also move inside the company, between teams, groups, and functions. Finance needs something from sales, legal sets limits on marketing claims, product drives operations. Every handoff is a flow, and every mismatch in timing, priorities, or expectations introduces friction.

These system-level flow problems are exactly what derail major transformations. When hand-offs bottleneck, approvals take too long, information loops drag on, and dependencies pile up, the organization ends up stuck in “try again” loops instead of moving forward. These long delays between trigger and outcome emerge from the system and are no one’s fault, but they become dangerous when competitors figure out how to overcome them.

Interconnections: How Everything Links Together

Flows are shaped by the connections between people, teams, and systems. These connections take many forms:

  • Structures: hierarchical, peer-to-peer, or cross-functional (e.g., marketing + finance).

  • Dependencies: independent, sequential (handoff style), or iterative (constant back-and-forth).

  • Timing: synchronous vs asynchronous, continuous vs bursty.

  • Controls: formal policies, informal norms, or thresholds.

  • Stages: a new initiative feels different than a mature one.

  • Intensity & quality: strong vs weak, clear vs fuzzy, reliable vs unreliable.

The more connections there are, the more complexity compounds. This is why scaling a company often feels chaotic: the system’s interconnections are multiplying exponentially.

This is also why rewiring connections is so powerful. For example, in one CPG company, combining coaching, automation, and data integration cut months out of every marketing campaign. Standardized handoffs and automated approvals between brand, agencies, compliance, and commercial teams unlocked millions in incremental revenue, simply by repairing flows and connections.

Accumulations: The Stocks That Build Up

Along the way, resources accumulate. These balances shape how resilient or fragile a company becomes.

Examples include:

  • Retained earnings (financial accumulation).

  • Warehouse stock (physical accumulation).

  • Employee skills (knowledge accumulation).

Accumulations differ in:

  • Amount and allocation.

  • Turnover and saturation limits.

  • Maturity vs obsolescence.

  • Accessibility, usefulness, and stability.

A large warehouse might be full, but if it’s packed with the wrong products, the accumulation is more liability than strength. The same applies to people, lots of talent doesn’t help if it’s locked inside silos.

Outputs: What the Company Delivers

Finally, outputs flow back to the environment:

  • Products and services to customers.

  • Money to suppliers and employees.

  • People leaving the organization.

  • Information shared publicly or privately.

The most successful companies focus on clear, external outputs that evolve through feedback. Those that focus only on internal goals (like raising rounds of venture funding without creating customer value) eventually run into hard limits when the environment pushes back.

SODA’s Approach

SODA equips leaders to not just see these dynamics, but to fix them. Our approach targets the system-level blockages that keep transformations from sticking.

We do it through three levers:

  1. Coaching leaders at all levels to resolve systemic flow and connectivity issues.

  2. Accelerating results with standardized handoffs and automated approvals.

  3. Building precise capabilities by leading internal or external development of data and digital solutions.

The outcome: no more endless loops. Leaders gain clarity, intended results actually happen, and organizations evolve and transform in months, not years.

Why This Matters

When leaders see their organization as a whole system of purpose, inputs, flows, interconnections, accumulations, and outputs, then they gain a different kind of control. Not control by force, but control by understanding.

And when they address the internal flows and connections between teams and functions, they eliminate the hidden tensions that drain energy and block change.

That’s the shift from transformation effort to transformation outcome, where complexity becomes a source of advantage, not frustration.