Another great post by our guest editor, John Worthington.

For decades, leaders have been told that transformation rests on “People, Process, Technology.” It’s catchy, but it’s not a system. At best, it’s a checklist.

The roots go back to Harold Leavitt’s Diamond (1965), which identified four interacting variables: People, Task, Structure, and Technology. This was an early recognition that organizational change is never isolated — shift one component, and the others are affected.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the Diamond was reinterpreted and simplified. Task and Structure were merged into the more generic “Process.” The result was the People–Process–Technology (PPT) triad — an easy-to-remember mantra that spread quickly through management training, consulting decks, and conference keynotes.

But here’s the problem: PPT lost much of the systemic depth. It became a slogan, not a system.

That’s where Russell Ackoff’s Systems Thinking is essential. Ackoff reframed organizations as systems of interdependent components, defined by purpose, relationships, and feedback loops. He gave Leavitt’s anatomy its physiology — showing how the parts actually interact, and why change in one area always reverberates across the whole.

The USM method takes this lineage one step further. It applies Ackoff’s systemic insights to enterprise service delivery, reducing everything to a universal management system of five processes and eight workflows. No endless frameworks, no buzzword cycles — just a practical architecture that works across every domain.

So the lineage looks like this:

  • Leavitt’s Diamond (1965): Anatomy of components.
  • People–Process–Technology (1990s): Simplified slogan, but lost systemic glue.
  • Ackoff’s Systems Thinking: Explained how components interact as a system.
  • USM Service Management System: Operationalized it into a repeatable architecture for managing services.

Rather see a short video? Check out this weird scene inside the gold mine:

The takeaway? We don’t need more slogans. We need systems. And USM provides the universal backbone for running services the way enterprises actually work.

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