The Process of Systems Thinking

Organizational learning is a set of processes and structures for supporting continuous learning in the workplace. It is a process for facilitating people’s ability to create new knowledge, share the understanding, and continuously improve themselves and the results of the organization.

—Diane Weston

Imagine for a moment this rather common scenario happening in your organization:

The members of the sales staff go to an off-site meeting to determine how to increase sales. One of the options they decide to implement is to bundle training into the sale of your company’s new product line. The problem with this option is that the training department was not represented in making that decision. The added demands come as a surprise to the training people, and they are not prepared for it. Trainers are getting burned out from the increasing requests for their services. This dynamic begins to decrease the common resource of the organization: training. Now if systems thinking had been applied to this particular situation—if the sales staff had evaluated the impact of their decision on other parts of the organization—other, much more effective results would have ensued.

Every organization strives for continuous improvement. Systems thinking affords you one opportunity for accomplishing this task. To begin, let us first position systems thinking as one of the key disciplines of organizational learning. In fact, it has often been referred to as the cornerstone discipline. According to author Peter Senge, organizational learning is a process within organizations in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to learn and to produce results they really care about. For more information on organizational learning, refer to Info-lines No. 9306, “Learning Organizations: The Trainer’s Role”; and No. 9602, “16 Steps to Becoming a Learning Organization.”

Systems thinking lets you look at a problem from a holistic perspective. It puts a problem into a context of the larger whole with the objective of finding the most effective place to make an appropriate intervention. With systems thinking you can try to determine what underlying, fundamental relationships are causing the problem, rather than being in a situation where you are forced to react and continuously “put out fires.” And how many of us can easily relate to that predicament?

Systems thinking also can help you identify and respond to a series of changes before those changes lead to disaster. In systems circles, it will help you to avoid becoming like a boiled frog. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the boiled frog story, here it is:

If you take a live frog and put it in a pan of hot water, the frog will jump right out. But if the frog is placed in a pan of cool water that is gradually heated up, the frog will happily remain in the water and allow itself to be cooked to death.

This story relates to those organizational systems that are set up to react only to changes larger than a quantifiable amount, and so cannot respond to changes falling below a specific threshold. As long as the change is slow enough, it will not trigger a response until it is too late. Systems thinking allows you to recognize and work with any series of small changes, adapting and making plans that will benefit you and your organization—before the situation reaches a crisis stage.

Benefits of Systems Thinking

Employing systems thinking means you will be able to better understand the ramifications of your decisions. You will be able to assess a situation and determine where to make the most effective intervention. The following benefits have been attributed to using systems thinking:

• more knowledge (the right questions asked)
• stakeholder involvement in the process
• a shared understanding of the problem
• many perspectives considered and integrated
• a vision beyond day-to-day events
• a long-term view by key decision makers
• the big picture seen as a competitive advantage

For some specific examples of how organizations use systems thinking to their advantage, see the case studies in this issue. The results of these cases illustrate how systems thinking has significantly improved processes and work environments.

Characteristics of Systems Thinking

When you start to think systemically, you will notice that the way you look at any and all problems will begin to change. Of course, these changes will take time and are part of a gradual process, but they do encompass a transformation in your thinking process. This change will have long-lasting and beneficial effects, both professionally and personally. As a systems thinker, you will be able to do the following

• understand complex relationships and interdependencies
• take responsibility to fix the problem
• balance short-term and long-term needs and perspectives
• reframe an issue or problem see the entirety of a situation
• discern patterns of recurring problems not driven by daily events
• question any and all underlying assumptions develop understanding and compassion

Principles of Systems Thinking

At this point, we can begin to apply the basic principles of systems thinking. These principles are based on Draper L. Kauffman’s book Systems 1: An Introduction to Systems Thinking and Peter Senge’s text The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.

• There Are No Final or Right Answers
  When you are dealing with a complex system and its many interdependencies, the main objective is to look for the best place to make an intervention—the place that will have the highest leverage in helping to solve the problem.
• Cause/Effect Is Not Related to Time/Space
  When looking for the highest leverage to solve the problem, you will first need to look back over time to find the root cause. The leverage to solve the problem will not always be found near the symptoms of the problem.
• Solutions Require Careful Consideration
  There will be time delays with any solutions you propose. These delays need to be considered when making a decision. For example: Your staff is becoming burned out because they have been working a lot of overtime hours. You decide to bring in a consultant to deliver training to your staff on how to manage this stress. The amount of time it takes to acquire the training and then implement the stress reduction strategies is a factor to consider when putting together a plan.
• Behavior Gets Worse Before It Gets Better
  As we go through the process of modifying a system, there will be some resistance to change. Behavior may go from bad to worse during this process. As members of the group begin to see the benefits of the shift in thinking, new patterns of behavior start to emerge.
• There Are Limits in Every System
  Nothing can grow forever. Eventually limits will be reached, and an awareness of these limits to growth is an essential first step in learning how to manage a system.
• Foresight Benefits You in the Long Run
  Solutions to problems affecting complex systems usually take some time to resolve. If you wait until a problem suddenly develops and are then forced to react to the situation, you probably will not have enough time to determine the best possible solution. If, on the other hand, resources are allocated toward a plan that anticipates potential problems, you will have more choices open to make the kind of decision that is valuable to your organization.

The next section provides examples of ways to detect and evaluate a problem from three different perspectives: events, patterns, and structures.

Perspectives of Systems Thinking

You notice that three trainers just quit last Friday. What would you do in this situation? We all have the tendency to react to events similar to this one—panic. But if we step back for a moment and try to see the bigger picture that may be causing this particular situation, we will get a much better understanding of the hows and whys of the event. First, take a look at the diagram shown in Levels of Problems, which depicts the three ways or perspectives from which we can view a problem.

The situation described above illustrates the “events” level: Something happened, and the first response is to simply react to that something.

The next level, “patterns,” takes us a step deeper into the problem. By having determined how many times something has happened, the process of seeing a pattern develop begins. To refer back to the trainer situation discussed earlier, a meeting with human resources personnel indicates that in addition to the trainers who quit, other employees also gave their notice to leave: five sales people, four engineers, and seven customer service representatives. This departure trend created a pattern that differs from the normal pattern.

Viewing a problem from the “structures” level enables us to ask questions such as, “What underlying structures are producing the patterns of behavior that we are seeing with this problem?” In other words, what is or are the underlying root cause(s) for employee departures from the organization? In this particular scenario, when the training manager began inquiring why people were leaving, it became evident that a key organizational decision made several weeks earlier was responsible for the mass exodus.

In response to the company’s low financial returns for the previous six months, top management decided to cease publication of a weekly performance update for employees. This decision stopped the information flow and fed into the employees’ fears that the company was failing. The employees’ subsequent move was to seek employment elsewhere.

This example points to a key element of systems thinking: When you decide to take an action, you need to ask what ramifications that action will have in an organization, both above and below the level at which the decision was made. Management policies and decisions can create confusion and can unwittingly be the source of a faltering system. By dealing with the elements at the level of the underlying structure, you will be increasing your leverage toward finding workable solutions to the organization’s problems.