Let me begin with the wise words of wisdom from Ray Dalio: "Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at."
This is easier said than done for leaders, which is why Ray explicitly calls this out in the first place🙂
Here is an excerpt from a real-life story:
“Mike was the CEO of Detroit Medical Center, was tasked with identifying how to solve a multi-million dollar loss the year before. He started a dialogue with the Nursing staff to identify ideas to overcome roadblocks. First among their ideas was to speed up patient discharge; it sometimes took up to three hours to get an ambulatory patient wheeled out and on their way home…”
And after so many twists & turns it comes back to… guess who? Mike 🙂
As the saying goes, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”
Corporations are complex systems & its leaders are the system designers and so they have to observe the real-world effectiveness of their policies, organizational design, tools, processes, etc. Culture after all is an emergent property of the system: culture in reality vs culture on paper!
Leaders have to focus on the design of the design factory! They have to deeply self-reflect and collaboratively discuss about what’s actually going on (get to the bottom of the proverbial iceberg) & collaboratively reduce systemic “friction” - improve “flow”.
And that takes Systems Thinking!
Analytical thinking unfortunately will not suffice. It works well for mechanistic systems. But, for complex systems we also need systems thinking . Analytical reductionist thinking underpins analytical sciences. What is a lab after all? Removal of the environment 🙂.
But, as Jamshid Gharajedaghi elegantly put it, “The behavior of open systems can be understood ONLY in the context of their environment.” You simply can’t understand (or improve) the whole just by breaking it apart into parts. We can’t ignore emergence.
Paraphrasing Heinz von Foerster:
“The word science comes from the Latin “scientia”, which in turn has the Indo-European root “skei”, and refers to activities such as “separate”, “distinguish”, “take apart". From “skei” came words like “schism” or “schizophrenia”.
A complimentary approach to this is to “unify”, “identify”, “put things together”. Those words have roots in the Greek word for one, “hen”, and out of that word comes “syn”, as in “symphony”, “synthesis”, “synergy” and also system.””
I’m not talking about anything new here.
DevOps calls this “The First Way”:
Most books give us only data and information (what/where/when/who). Let’s shift to gaining knowledge (how), understanding (why) & maybe some wisdom.
Does your organization/team practice Systems Thinking? Appreciate your engagement, feedback & criticism!