Organisations as living systems and the power of interconnection

Organisations as living systems and the power of interconnection sits within Unit 3CO01 and addresses Assessment Criterion 2.2, which asks learners to explain how organisations function as whole systems and how the work of a people professional can have consequences across the wider organisation. The video draws on systems thinking as its central framework, using it to challenge the traditional mechanistic view of organisations — the idea that an organisation operates like a machine with predictable, replaceable parts — and to argue instead for an organic, living systems perspective in which every element is connected to every other.

Within that framework, the video covers four specific concepts: interdependence, feedback loops, emergence, and synergy. It uses the relationships between organisational functions — including HR, finance, sales, production, and procurement — to illustrate interdependence, and traces how a decline in employee engagement can produce a chain of consequences touching productivity, customer experience, revenue, and cost decisions before looping back to affect engagement again. Emergence is examined through organisational culture as a property that arises from countless interactions rather than from any single policy, while synergy is explored in the context of people practices that either reinforce or contradict one another, using the tension between stated values around collaboration and individually structured bonus schemes as a concrete illustration.

The video also examines the system-wide impact of routine people professional decisions, using a single hiring decision as a worked example to show how one action touches team dynamics, workload, training resources, manager capacity, budget, succession, and culture simultaneously. Taken together, the content maps directly onto the indicative content for AC 2.2, covering the organic and holistic view of organisational design, the importance of synergy and interconnected people practices, and the broader implications of HR decisions for organisational and people strategies, policies, and procedures.