Improvement and development
Improvement of an enterprise/creation system is reduced to changing technologies to more modern ones, setting up flawless operation of technologies, establishing good logistics of work products between technological operations (fulfilling requests of the operations management: removing constraints on the flow of work, products, information). In the practice of improvement, changes occur only in terms of technologies and moments of work execution, but not in the discipline of the practice. During the improvement, people are retrained (training) to work with new technology, for example, mastering new software for the same discipline: transitioning from one CAD system to another, or from one issue tracker to another. In the process of improvement, additional education in terms of disciplines or reading textbooks with new concepts is not required --- the mindset remains the same.
A good approximation of the mindset regarding improvement would be the observation that it follows the line of changing the phenomenon: the meme on which the system was made is not actually touched --- there are no new ideas, only the implementation of old ideas, everything gets better and better. Adapting the system to the environment without affecting any knowledge means there is no need to reprogram brains and computers with new knowledge, only to adjust old knowledge and choose more convenient material environment.
If the system is reproduced, everything will need to be readjusted again. Biologically, this means that a growing duckling will be fed better, treated better, trained and nurtured, but it will not turn into a swan --- only a healthy strong duck.
Development of an enterprise/organizational entity occurs when the practice in terms of discipline changes, which inevitably leads to a change in the technology to support this discipline. During development, people are educated (education, "as in university") to master a new way of thinking, studying new concepts and their relationships, and then getting trained (often in the workplace) to work with new technology, new tools to support the new discipline.
In fact, during development, there is a correction of the meme, knowledge of creating systems --- those very smart mutations that potentially (not a fact! These are all "hypotheses", although carefully designed) will lead to new qualities. For example, when duck genes are tweaked and it becomes more like a swan, if the system is replicated based on these genes, the neck of the former duckling will immediately become longer, and the body larger. This, of course, does not negate the fact that the new system can also be improved, but even a poorly developed "new duckling" will have a longer neck and a larger body compared to a well-trained and well-fed "old extensively developed" duck. And if you continue to improve it --- the neck will be significantly longer, and the body much larger. Genes solve everything. Without development, there will be "Lysenkism": attempts to obtain a phenomenon through "proper care of the organism" that can only be obtained by modifying the genome. Nothing good usually comes from the approach of "much improvement leads to development": no matter how much you improve a scissors jump, you won't be able to overcome a two-meter bar. You will have to completely rebuild the approach to jumps to unfold in flight towards the bar backward and flip it over face up --- you will have to relearn the entire jump technique, build a new discipline.
The current trend is that the periods of improvement are becoming shorter and shorter, and steps of development have to be taken more and more frequently: the enterprise/organizational entity starts using practices unfamiliar to team members, as competition intensifies not only in terms of technologies but also in terms of disciplines --- in competitive struggle, it is not enough to use the "best tools", it is necessary to use the "best thinking" above all, and to support this "best thinking" with the "best tools". For example, recognizing that upfront planning is impossible in the current activities and transitioning from classical project management with project management software to case management and learning software trackers/issue trackers.
As a result, instead of "lifetime professions", employees need to have the most diverse competencies, including mastery of various disciplines --- but this mastery of disciplines will be useful for only a decade, and even within this period, there will be a need for two to three improvements: mastering new tools to support the discipline. And then there will be development again: mastering new disciplines and new technologies for these disciplines.
The main challenge in development, as always in the case of theoretical disciplines, is the mismatch between theoretical functional objects/alphas as objects of attention "from the book" and actual working constructive products/artifacts as objects of attention "in life". The ability to see objects of thinking in objects from real life (conceptual attention guidance) and maintain them in focus throughout the project (composure, both personal and collective) is trained. This ability is the main thing that distinguishes people with a good basic education from amateurs who have simply memorized the most common sequences of button presses on the entrusted tools of some organizational entity. People with a good basic education are able to conduct elementary reasoning in terms of a discipline and apply technology correctly (without novice mistakes!) taking into account the applicability of the discipline, while amateurs will continue to make mistakes: automatism in mastering technology does not eliminate thinking errors due to lack of discipline mastery.
In the course "Systems Management", the topic of developers' development is illustrated through organizational development. However, the ideas of individual and organizational development (project team, startup, enterprise) are the same and can even (as shown in the course of systems thinking) be applied to communities and societies. Therefore, the material of the course can be used for planning organizational development, personal development, and community development planning.