The Sociotechnical Paradigm of IDT

The sociotechnical systems (STS) approach originated from research in complex organizational work design, which focuses on the dynamic interaction between people and technology in a workplaces. It is devoted to the effective blending of both the technical and social systems of an organization. These two aspects must be considered interdependently, because arrangements that are optimal for one may not be optimal for the other and trade-offs are often required. Thus, for effective organization design, there is need for both dual focus and joint optimization.The sociotechnical term was first coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist, Ken Bamforth and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London. Nowadays, the original STS concept has been greatly expanded to include approaches and theories regarding the social aspects of people and society, and technical aspects of organizational structure and processes.

So, why is IDT related to STS? 

The first reason is because the term "innovation" used in our IDT approach is defined as a market-oriented notion. The market demand, which is the starting point of any innovative endeavors, is determined by the emerging preferences of intended customers, which, in turns, is dynamically influenced by the social interactions among people on the market. Such cycles involve people and organizations, which represents the social part of the sociotechnical system of IDT. In others words, the opportunity (or the end/goal) for innovation is always determined by the market, which is "social" in nature. 

At the same time, while our IDT approach is domain-independent and applicable to different professions, it is especially useful for those innovative ideas that must be carried out (or instantiated in the real world) by applications of some technologies. These include any technical artifacts such as products, processes, services and systems, and give raise to the technical part of the sociotechnical system of IDT. In others words, the implementations (or the means) for innovation are mostly based on technology, which is "technical" in nature. 

The outcomes from IDT is an artifact which, according to the definition by Herbert Simon, must be both purposeful and functional. The purposefulness of an artifact is defined by the social reality including many people factors and market conditions that influence customers' preferences; whereas the function of an artifact is derived from the brute reality that is realized by certain technologies based on the laws of the nature. According to STS theory, this dual character of innovation outcomes (i.e., artifacts must be both purposeful and functional) lead to the requirement that innovation approaches must be both social and technical. 

This is why our IDT approach is based on the sociotechnical paradigm, rather than those conventional views that often treat technical and social aspects of a system separately. Traditionally, technical activities are modeled as a "question-answer" pair from "what" to "how", in which the question is "what" do you want to have and the answer is "how" to achieve what you desire to have. What (i.e., the goal) is often given to (or prescribed for) engineers a prior by an external party, and the technical job is to find the best how (i.e., the means) that can achieve the given what under different constraints (which are also determined by external parties). The important questions of "who" (who are the customers) and "why" (why are they not satisfied with what they currently have), that can only be answered by social insights and understandings, are often handled separately by non-technical units of an organization (such as marketing or service departments). This large separation between technical and social activities is a major hindrance of effective technology developments and deployments in today's business organizations.

In our sociotechnical paradigm for IDT, the "who-to-why" social dimension and the "what-to-how" technical dimension are integrated to form a continuous "who-why-what-how" sociotechnical cycle. The innovator always begins an innovation task by asking the "who" question to determine who are the customers that he/she is charged to serve. Then, he/she will ask the "why" question to understand why these customers are not happy and satisfied with what they currently have (i.e., to know the current customer needs and possible opportunity gaps). The insights that have to be gathered during the why stage of this sociotechnical paradigm should also include deep understandings of the evolving trends of customers' lifestyles due to new technology developments and market competitions (i.e., to predict the emerging customer wants). Those important insights of current needs and emerging wants will then guide the innovator to the next stage of "what" questions, where abstract thinking is used to choose a set of functional requirements, that when realized by innovative products or services, can bring a new meaning to customers' lifestyles. These choosen functional requirements are the targets of innovation, which will be addressed by the next stage of "how" questions to instantiate the artifact details that satisfy the innovation targets. After the innovated artifacts (i.e., how) are introduced onto the market, they will further shape the customers and their lifestyles, giving rise to new innovation opportunities during the next sociotechnical cycle.

This sociotechnical paradigm of IDT will be further elaborated with specific innovation stages and reasoning steps during future blogs. So, stay tuned!