systems thinking Archives

There’s bad news for an awful lot of organizations. Their grip on the future is weak or nothing. They react, instead of responding and acting. Their view is narrow instead of broad. They think they know the future, but their grip on it is superficial at best.

Why? Ideas about change and the future come in little, trivial scatters, instead of being taken up comprehensively. Everything we do is part of a complex of systems. The questions are not narrow or simple, and the assumptions we work and act on are based in ever-changing conditions. But we oversimplify, bound, and narrow our thinking when we need to do exactly the opposite.

In all this, executives may even be rewarded for their narrow, specialized knowledge and abilities. Outcomes and outputs are measured in narrow ways. Progress in some areas completely hides decline, as when the measures are gross and cross-company. For example, an international company looking at its total revenues could see overall growth when in fact its fortunes and businesses are in decline in its base markets. Global growth often masks soft or declining markets.

What can you do about this?

It’s time to change your thinking. Part of this is being humble: admit you are always on a quest to know more and understand change better. Part is to open, and keep open a conversation about change and about your future. Recognize new ideas about the future and reward them. Let in the controversial and the scary ideas that may come with a frank acknowledgement that you need to know more and you need to change.

Break loose from the “what’s wrong let’s fix it” mentality of most managers. While you fix, you also need to change things. Your current reality is not the whole story, and your current view of what needs doing is not enough.

Spend time explicitly talking about where things are going, how your markets are evolving, and what you might do about it. Plan to build for resilience, not based on certainty–you won’t have that, but based on your best sense of the range of possibilities. And make the organization strong–ready it for uncertainty by building in divergent thought, new skills, wider partnerships and relationships, and deep and continuing intelligence on the world–the whole world, and how it’s changing.

Far too often, people propose solutions to problems large and small that are narrow and shortsighted. they take a binary view: cause and effect, A by itself leads to B.

They fail to think about how things are part of much bigger systems with complex interacting forces, players, and parts. This happens in businesses, in families, and at the regional, national, and global levels.

Sometimes this is simple narrow thinking or ignorance, but often today, at least in the US, it comes from partisan politics. How the public understands the issues or how opponents will characterize your decision later becomes more important than what's really true. And for similar reasons, politically, the short term usually beats the long term.

That is why shutting down the US Federal Government looks like a reasonable tactic to some people. They have not thought about how it would affect things beyond the political tussle underway right now. In fact, a US Federal Government shutdown would have a steep price tag–rather than reducing the budget deficit, it would increase it.

Some other examples. In the budget debates, it's easy to say that US aid to poor farmers in Asia and Africa is something we just can't afford right now. Their plight–however unfortunate–should not be our top priority, when our resources are limited, we should invest first at home.

Yet that aid is integral to critical things: the supply of affordable food in those countries and in the global marketplace, political and economic stability in multiple countries, the ability of people in those countries to afford US products and services, and so on. Investing in African poor farmers is investing in the US.

Arguments about issues like this are often touted as "common sense." Usually that means using a rationale that comes from a different context. For example, politicians like to say "I have to balance my checkbook each month, why shouldn't the Federal Government have to balance its budget?" But clearly, the US Federal Government and an individual's family finances are not the same thing.

Such arguments also tend to focus on the near term at the expense of the long term. Another example: arguing that we cannot stop burning coal for energy because too much of our electricity is generated from coal to stop using it. Doing so would weaken the economy now and in the next few years (never mind the critical need to move to alternative energy and the potential growth from transforming our energy systems).

The response to failures to think in systems has to be to regularly, and clearly offer a "Yes, but….." and to show people what else is affected, and what else is at stake. It will also make a difference to elaborate on the future outcomes of a decision by describing what is likely to result in the system and related systems that the decision will affect. A scenario or set of scenarios can be a powerful tool for doing that.

Image: Elsie esq. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license.

Not good enough

Failure to think in systems