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Systems thinking
Systems thinking is essentially the discipline of stepping back to look at how elements in a system are working together. We are naturally here and now and me thinkers. When I’m making a decision or when I’m doing something, I am naturally thinking about how it affects me right now. Systems thinking is the self-discipline to back up and say, “Well, what might happen later as a result of doing this now? And who and what else might be affected as a result of doing this now?” Training ourselves to broaden our aperture. A nurse working in a hospital ward who runs out of linens might just go next door and take some from the unit next door. She’s solved her problem, but of course she’s created a problem now for the other unit. So systems thinking is thinking more broadly, expanding the boundaries to include a larger group of people who might be affected. Redrawing the boundaries is always a judgment call. There’s no perfect boundary that you should get right. It’s just about stepping back a little and thinking about who else and when else will this simple decision now have an impact on? And this is a way of thinking that contributes to the prevention of many failures.
Embrace disruption
We are confronted with endless changes and new disruptions, with the pace of change, with new technologies, with societal concerns, and these disruptions give rise to the potential for failures we haven’t seen before. Whenever there’s a major disruption in society or in your life that you didn’t see coming, it’s easy to just, you know, feel bad about it and feel anxious and not know what to do next. At the same time disruption gets our attention, it also creates the opportunity for us to experiment. Knowing that there’s uncertainty, knowing that we don’t actually know how things are all going to turn out, we can proactively experiment and learn as we deal with these disruptions. There will always be disruptions coming our way. When you think about them, react to those with a systems thinking perspective, you are more able to kind of navigate the uncertainty that they bring, to proactively try things and see what happens, to know that there’s a high likelihood that things will go wrong, but think more broadly about it so that you’re on high alert for learning. The real task is to use those disruptions to trigger new learning.
Create synergy
As a senior executive, let’s say your goal is to lead an organization that is really good at innovating, you know, really good at coming up with new products and services that customers love. It might be tempting to just tell everybody loud and clear, “We want more innovation.” It’s unlikely to work very well. If you really want more innovation, you need to design your organization as a system so that it produces innovation. What might that look like? Well, it wouldn’t be one thing. It would be a variety of things that interact together to create that wonderful outcome, such as giving people free time and resources to experiment with things that might not work. Such as creating venues for people to come together specifically to share novel ideas they have that are incomplete and need each other to flesh them out and maybe take them the next step. Such as valuing failures as great stepping stones along the way to innovation success. A whole variety of things that work together to produce synergy, the word we use to describe the phenomenon of the whole being more than the sum of the parts.