‘You think that because you understand “one”, that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget, that you must also understand “and”’ - Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
How do think? It’s not something you probably think about very often. You’re born, you go to school, you learn some stuff, you go to work, where you hopefully use the things you’ve learned to think about a problem. At least in Western culture, most things we are taught follow a model of linear thinking. The school year has a sequence, every lesson has a sequence. A and then B and then C and then D.
This is great for a lot of things. Passing exams in school, at least with the way most school systems work, requires this style of thinking. With the chaos of the modern world, there’s another type of thinking I’d argue is more important. It starts with the child asking “why”.
If you’ve spent any amount of time around a child, they are constantly asking why. Why is this like this? How does X relate to Y? What caused that to happen? It’s cute from the outside, as someone who’s about to become a father for the first time, ask me if it’s still cute in a few years. The child is trying to make connections. To work out how the different pieces of their understanding and how they relate to each other. The child, quite naturally, is thinking in systems.
Somewhere along the way, this gets lost. Linear thinking is pushed down your throat, learn this, then this, then this. You get a job, perform task X, then task Y, then task Z, and hopefully at the end get a pay rise. When you’re down in the detail this works well, but the world around us isn’t linear and definitely doesn’t follow a straight, easy to understand path.
Imagine for a moment you had to make a decision about the future of the company you work for. For arguments sake assume you work in finance. One way to make the decision is to simply make the best decision that benefits you, right now. The selfish option. And honestly, I’ve seen lots of people over the years who take this approach. But the company is made up of lots of different people, departments, customers, suppliers. There is an entire complex web of relationships that make up the system as a whole. To make something like a sensible decision, you need to have some understanding of the entire system. If you were to apply linear thinking to this task, you might think the best decision (for accounts) is to put up your prices 100x and find a cheaper supplier. $$$ for everyone! The short-term impact - profits go up and you look great for your insightful decision. But what’s the long-term impact of your decision? If you’ve forgotten about the rest of the system (in this case, customer satisfaction) your system is going to die.
Systems thinking is about trying to understand all the nodes, all the relationships, and how they work together to make the system as a whole. Famous system thinker Russel Ackoff said “A system is never the sum of it’s parts - it’s the product of their interaction”. When it comes to making decisions, think about the different pieces but more importantly think about their interactions. If you understand one piece, ask yourself what are the other pieces that I interact with and if I make change X how is that going to impact them. It’s not about slowing down, it’s about truly understanding the long term impacts of your actions.
James