People, processes and place

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The images on the opposite page are rendered in different ways to illustrate familiar perspectives of property within business organisations - the critical issues in each case are shaded and the context is left blank.  Two viewpoints disregard property, one shows property managed as a resource in its own right, and one shows a situation where property is managed with human resources and technical processes.  Each image places different boundaries around a specific system being examined.  In the first three situations, the focal issues are seen as interacting in a limited way with their environment, which is a defining characteristic of a closed system.  In the fourth image, each part of the system influences and is influenced by the other part, which is an accurate way to define a complex, open system.

Closed systems are characterised by stable, predictable behaviour.  Interactions between the parts of a closed system are governed by relatively simple cause-and-effect relationships and shielded from outside interference.  Knowledge about the parts and their dependencies is usually sufficient to understand the properties and behaviour of the whole.  Property has historically been managed in this way - consider the institutional lease for commercial property tenants which was prevalent from the 1950’s until the late 1990’s.  The conditions of the standard lease were designed to obtain a secure cash flow for investors and paid little regard to occupier’s needs; they reflected a property market which was almost entirely supply-driven and over which landlords had tight control.  In this situation there were few variables, accommodation was viewed as an unavoidable overhead and the job for property managers was to minimise expenditure on rent and maintenance as far as possible.

In contrast to closed systems, open systems have permeable boundaries, allowing them to interact with other systems and to adapt to change in their environment through a process of feedback.  The behaviour of open systems is complex; it is more difficult to predict and control because change at one level of the system can causes change at a different level, often some time after the initial causal event.  The levers influencing the performance of open systems cannot be found through analysis of the parts - a comprehensive representation of the system’s invisible structure or network is needed which defines how the parts are connected.  There is evidence of increasing demand from managers for better information and knowledge about this type of approach. 

How a system is defined, and whether it is treated as an open or a closed system, depends upon what the observer of the system is looking for; the idea of a system is simply a way to explain something selected for study.  Methods for managing property as an integrated business resource require a different perspective from the patterns of thinking and practice that are relevant to closed systems because the combination of people with process and place means that the behaviour of the whole system is likely to lose its previous predictable nature on account of the fact that different people see situations in different ways.  To guard against this uncertainty, a management system for business accommodation should encourage multiple perspectives, rather than reducing a complex system to an over-simplified model.

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