ABSTRACT
This article approaches innovation in public sector organizations from a systemic management perspective (Schwaninger 2009), which assumes that organizations are complex adaptive systems (Stacey 1995) that cannot be controlled entirely by hierarchical methods. Instead, systemic management requires the use of decision models that have the required variety commensurate with the management of a public sector organization (Rios and Suárez 2012). Prominent representatives of a systems theory approach regard organizations as social systems that consist of specific communication: the communication of decisions. Communication between members of the organization creates the distinction between the organization and its environment and thus creates and re-creates the organization itself (Luhmann 2000). Organizations persist through connecting communication on decisions to other communication on decisions. In other words, communication on new decisions (e.g., on innovation) needs to be connected to established communication. Thus, organizational innovation can only happen if an external stimulus is considered to be a piece of meaningful information for the system. Stimuli without any meaning for the organization will not be taken into consideration because they are neither understood nor could they support the ongoing flow of communications of decisions. Therefore, in order to deal with innovation while safeguarding its own existence, an organization implicitly manages its conditions of connectivity between different communications of decisions by discerning, observing, and establishing meaningful information (Luhmann 2000). The existing communication in a system, based on an ongoing mutual reconstruction of meaning (Berger and Luckmann 1966), separates meaningful from meaningless information, and thus acts like a filter for incoming information. Consequently, a systemic manager will try to find strategies to form connectivity which respect the self-organizing and sense-making processes in a system and intervene in these processes adequately, respectfully, and continuously. In this article, we will use the term ‘communication stream’ for a number of communication activities that are linked to a specific decision.
