One approach to analyzing and understanding the complexity in our organizations is to create a graphical representation, or map, of the elements of the system, describing how and when they relate to each other. One tool for mapping these relationships is the causal loop, a diagram that tells a story about the situation. You can use the drawing to explain the dynamic interdependencies that influence behavior in your organization; when you do this with groups of employees, the barriers to improvement will become explicit and resistance will drop because people will realize that this dynamic interaction is due to the structure of the organization rather than because of some failure in them personally. The focus will shift to solutions rather than blame, which makes causal loops good tools for learning how to learn, rather than simply learning how to solve an archetypal problem.
Drawing appropriate causal loops takes practice. You will need to learn the language of the loops—the symbols and the meaning of the elements of the drawings. You will also need to learn how to facilitate a discussion so that you surface the stories that describe what the loops represent.
The causal loop below tells the story of team risk taking. The upper loop indicates that by praising effort from the start (as opposed to praising results), employees will be more likely to accept risk-taking behavior, which leads to more experimenting and more learning, and more praise for trying. The lower loop indicates that when experimenting results in a negative reaction from others (such as critical comments, reassignments, loss of resources), defensive responses will increase and people will develop a fear of failing. This fear makes them less willing to experiment and take creative chances.
Team Risk-Taking Causal Loop
