The four types of control systems - Organisational control systems | Coursera (2024)

How do you lead your organisation when today’s work environment is so competitive and complex? When you become responsible for leading an organisation, your most important leadership challenge will be enabling your organisation to deliver on its strategy while ensuring it remains sufficiently agile. This course will prepare you to tackle this challenge. You will examine what organisational culture is, the primary organisational structures, and what we mean by ‘systems’, before building on your foundational knowledge and taking a more strategic perspective. The structured learning activities that complement this course (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments) will not only prepare you to take your organisation forward in a more strategic direction, but to make better decisions along the way.

What are systems for exactly? This can be quite a tricky question because it obviously depends on the particular system we are talking about. Yet, from a management perspective there is a straightforward general answer to this question: systems are there to control performance and risk. This week you will learn what this means exactly, and what the most important implications are for how you design your systems around your business strategy. You will learn to understand systems more broadly than just IT systems, and how to deploy them effectively to manage and control performance and risk. An important part of this involves deciding on the key indicators that you want to track, and how you want to report information that is strategically relevant. Too many business leaders drown in numbers to the point where they can't see the wood from the trees. This week is focused on helping you design systems that can keep you focused on seeing the wood instead of the trees.