If you’re a leader fed up with problems that fall into the category of I thought we solved that – in other words, recurring problems – I encourage you to add systems thinking to your skill set.
That’s what one of my clients, Christina (fictitious name) did to shake a nagging problem that worked every nerve in her leadership being.
After one too many rounds of failed internal fixing, I was invited in to work with Christina and her staff on applying a systems thinking lens to their department challenges. Systems thinking can be defined as follows:
“… the ability to see how organizational systems, sub-systems, and their parts interact with and influence each other; and how these systems create and contribute to specific problems.”
Scontrino-Powell, Systems Thinking: How to Lead in Complex Environments (2013)
One of systems thinking’s great powers is to shift the problem-solving energy away from unproductive “people-blaming” to the source of most organizational problems; faulty systems, their negative patterns, and the results they produce. In the work with Christina and her staff, we focused on three levels of assessment:
- Revealing the System – identifying all the system parts and where and how they interconnect; illuminating patterns of behavior and interactions and the results they create; and revealing how work actually gets done through the system in its current state.
- Surfacing Problem Patterns – finding where the system is breaking down – surfacing the patterns, mental models, and other conditions that are perpetuating the breakdowns, and flagging the patterns that can be influenced.
- System Redesign – prioritizing those patterns where small disruptive changes can deliver powerful/leveraged results that lead to a system that is high-performing and continously self-improving.
When Christina’s team engaged systems thinking, they identified a set of effective resolutions to achieve sustainable change. The approach required time and a tolerance for messiness, but it paid off. For example, the approach shifted a pattern of work driven by staff territorialism and divisiveness to a system with team integration and collaboration, a significant systemic change.
Ultimately, systems thinking isn’t about finding one-time fixes. It’s a continuous process committed to evolving better systems over time to achieve better results.
If you would like to learn more about how to develop a systems-thinking skillset, here are three sources to start with: 1) https://schoolofsystemchange.org/, 2) Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, https://tinyurl.com/ynnfj45f , and Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf. And as always, feel free to reach out to me at allinstrategies.com or rene@allinstrategies.com