To Solve Your Problems
- Strategic Planning For Everyday Life
Would you like to think more complexly? Understand why certain things happen
to you sometimes seemingly by chance, sometime seemingly by law? Or to
become more productive finding shortcuts where no one else is looking? What
about improving your relationships understanding why certain arguments truly
arise? What would you think if I told you that you can achieve these things by
working smarter, not harder? I’ve yet to meet a person who wouldn’t say “Sign
me up!” I, too, want all of those things for my life. I’m here to show you how it
just might be possible with a shift in your thinking. A paradigm shift in the way
you think about the world to systems thinking.
Everything in the world around us is part of a system. A system is a combination
of both physical and abstract things, and how those things interact in relation to
one another. Systems thinking is being able to examine and analyze ourselves
and the things around us with the express purpose of being able to improve upon
them. It requires us to be more observant and aware of the things that impact us,
in both big and small ways, and then be willing to take the necessary steps to
change the obstacles in our path.
Your whole life is a system. It is made up of a lot of parts that interact with one
another. First, you have physical components like your body and the things
around you that you can touch: your house, car, clothes, cell phone, books, etc.
Then we add in the abstract pieces to the puzzle: your beliefs, convictions, ideas,
and values — everything that defines your core sense of self and makes you who
you are on the inside. Finally, we incorporate the things in your life which youdo not have complete control over, like your relationships, your health, and your
finances. All of these things work together to make up the system of your life.
In systems thinking, it is often helpful to make diagrams so that we can visualize
and better understand how things influence one another and work together
within the whole system. It is only then that we really begin to be able to break
down and analyze our systems so that we can improve them. Systems thinking is
not something that will happen overnight and immediately come easily. It is a
way of looking at the world that will take time to develop.
Let’s start by thinking of your life as a system. When you begin to diagram,
map, or list the components of your life as a system, begin by thinking of the
people you encounter and the things you do nearly every day, as those will have
a great impact on your life system. Your list may begin to take shape like this:
You (your body) Boss/ Colleagues Sleep
Friends Career Food
Family Hygiene Exercise
While you would be off to a good start, the list of your life as a system would be
nowhere near complete (although that is all many outside observers may assume
your list includes). You would need to add many more components to it, such as:
Pets Beliefs Faith
Car House Clothes
Health Wealth Worries
Values Cell Phone Computer
Television Acquaintances Traffic
Books Newspapers Internet
Education Bills Social MediaWeather Prices/Costs World Events
Financial Markets Fears Grocery Shopping
Now the combination of the two lists would be much closer to an accurate
representation of a life system, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.
Everyone’s life system will be unique.
Once you have drawn, written, or mapped out your list, you are now ready to
start analyzing it. The beauty now is that you are more aware of the things that
are impacting the system of your life. You are tuned in to how you are spending
your time, and whether there are improvements that can be made to increase
your productivity and help you achieve your goals. You can be more cognizant
of the ways in which the parts of your life system interact with one another and
impact your life. You can begin to make the kinds of positive changes that you
would perhaps never even have realized you needed without shifting the way
you look at the world to systems thinking.
Systems thinking is, at its heart, looking at problems in a way we haven’t before.
It is a realization that everything is interconnected, and we should look at things
as a whole rather than just a group of independent parts. Systems thinking means
looking at the big picture first, then digging in deeper to examine its parts and
focusing on the relationships between them. It is a supportive framework that
helps you develop habits in your mind. Those habits give you feelings of
strength and power that make you understand you have the ability to tackle even
the most complex problems and affect positive change.
[i]
Anytime we can create habits in our minds, we save time, because we can do
things without having to consciously think about them, and thus our brains are
free to think about other things. Making an investment by taking some time at
the beginning to solve a problem, either by changing a system that isn’t working
or creating a new system, will save so much more time in the long run. This
holds true whether you are working toward a personal or professional goal.
Adopting even just a little bit of systems thinking into your life can help you to
improve countless areas.
In this book, we will explore the basics of systems thinking. We will examine its
elements and see how it works. We will develop the tools you need to help you
apply systems thinking to your daily life and relationships.
Along with a powerful paradigm shift in the way you look at the world and the
problems you may encounter in it comes the opportunity for making mistakes.
We will study three of the many possible errors that may arise in systems and
help you to avoid or overcome them.
It’s time to take the first step toward seeing our world through a different lens,
and it all begins with a turn of the part
What is art of thinking
As a teacher, I often found that visual demonstrations were the best at helping
my students to understand difficult or abstract concepts. For one lesson, I
brought in a boomerang, a curved, flat piece of wood designed to be thrown and
originally used as a weapon for hunting. I opened a box containing a boomerang
and held the boomerang in my hand, walking around so that my students could
see it up close. Then I threw the boomerang. I asked my students what made the
boomerang come back to me. They unanimously thought it was me throwing the
boomerang. I told them that we would further test their theory. I held the box
that the boomerang came in and threw it the same way.
Of course, this time the box did not come back to me, but rather flew for a short
distance and dropped to the ground. We went on to discuss that it clearly was not
my hand or the way I threw the boomerang that made it behave the way it did.
When my hand released the boomerang, it freed the boomerang to operate in the
way its structure was designed to. While we were discussing a lesson on physics,
the same lesson is central to systems theory. Systems thinking allows behavior
that is already present within the structure of a system to be suppressed or
released as we study and understand systems and problems.
What is Systems Thinking?
The term “systems thinking” was coined by Barry Richmond in 1987. According
to Richmond, “Systems thinking is the art and science of making reliable
inferences about behavior by developing an increasingly deep understanding of underlying structure.”
[ii]
In The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, author Peter Senge
states, “Systems thinking [is] a way of thinking about, and a language for
describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the
behavior of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more
effectively, and to act more in tune with the natural processes of the natural and
economic world.”
[iii]
In order to get a better understanding of what these two experts are telling us,
let’s go back to the basics. What is a system? A system is a group of things that
are interconnected and demonstrate their own behavior pattern over time.
Systems are usually the cause of their own behavior. Even when outside forces
act on a system, it reacts in a way that is consistent with the character of the
system. If the same outside forces were to act on a different system, there would
likely be a different outcome.
Why is thinking in systems useful?
Systems thinking helps us look at the world in a new way because it encourages
us to look at events and patterns by focusing on the connection and relationship
between a system’s parts, instead of only looking at the individual parts in
isolation. Systems thinking leads us away from trying to come up with a quick
fix to a problem, which we too often do, in favor of considering the long-term
consequences our actions may cause. It supports a deeper level of understanding
than we typically take the time to seek.
Systems thinking is a paradigm shift from our more traditional thinking patterns
because we have been taught to look at things rationally, and to try to look for
clear cause and effect connections. We are now used to trying to study things in
small, digestible pieces, and to attempting to solve problems as quickly as
possible by taking control of situations around us. Quite often, we focus on
external sources as the cause of all of our problems instead of looking internallyour systems to see what improvements can be made.
Western culture tends to look for a problem’s cause as coming from outside of
our systems, instead of within. There are times throughout our history when this
worldview has proven very effective. Many big problems have been solved by
looking outward, like finding cures and vaccines for deadly diseases, finding
ways to produce enough food to feed the people of the world, and developing
mass transportation systems. The problem is that when we fail to take the time to
examine our internal systems as well, sometimes our solutions create new
problems. These problems can be significant, serious, and very hard to
overcome, if they are really ingrained in the structure of a system.
While that traditional method of analysis may be helpful at times, it can’t help us
to solve every problem we face despite all of our best efforts. War, harm caused
to our environment, people suffering from drug addiction, people who are
unemployed or living in poverty, and many life-threatening diseases are all
examples of problems that remain despite years of analysis and technological
advances. These problems persist because they are systems problems. No one
wanted to create them and everyone wants them to be solved, but they won’t be
until we take a good, hard look at the structures of the systems they are part of.
Instead of looking to assign blame as to what caused the problem, we need to
roll up our sleeves and dive deeper to find a solution. The solutions are within
our reach if we are willing to do what is necessary to find them. We need to be
willing to look at things from a whole new perspective. This book is all about
showing us a different way of seeing and thinking about the world and
everything in it.
That’s why systems thinking is so vitally important. Some problems are systems
problems. No matter what we do, these problems simply won’t go away though
linear or event oriented thinking. After all, it has been said the definition of
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results. There is nothing wrong with linear thinking. There is a time and a placefor it, for sure. It has served us well on countless occasions throughout human
history. Thinking in systems just gives us a more complex and complete picture
of events.
As we have discussed previously, systems thinking doesn’t immediately come
easily to most people and it takes time to develop this skill and adopt the new
way of seeing the world until it becomes an automatic habit. In fact, up to 95%
of our population is unable to think in systems. They focus on searching for a
simple cause and effect connection when it comes to solving problems. The
difficulty lies in that it simply won’t give a complete and accurate view of the
problem, and it is ineffective in solving systemic issues.
Systems thinking allows us to reclaim our instinct about whole systems while we
strengthen our abilities to understand their parts and how they are
interconnected. Thinking in systems enables us to ask “what-if” questions about
the behaviors we may see in the future, and gives us license to be bold enough to
unleash our creativity when it comes to redesigning our systems. We begin to
come up with solutions that would never have crossed our minds before.
Systems thinking gives us a complete picture by allowing us to examine the
interconnected relationships between the system’s components instead of only
looking at them as independent individual parts. It brings to mind an activity I
did with my kids when they were little. I blindfolded them and set out bowls of
ingredients on the kitchen counter, telling them we were going to work on a
project together. I asked them to feel the items one by one and tell me what they
thought we were going to do. When they felt the licorice, they thought it might
be a pencil. After feeling the gumdrops, they thought they were marshmallows,
and that either rice Krispy treats or hot chocolate were in their very near future.
The gumballs threw them again, as they believed they might be marbles and part
of a game we would play together. They were torn between thinking that the
icing was either toothpaste or the shaving cream that we practice spelling wordsin. I chuckled all along at where their imaginations were taking them with each
item they touched. Even though they were blindfolded, I could see that my kids
were confused. They were trying to see how everything might fit together, but
by only being introduced to the parts one at a time, they had too limited
information to draw any reasonable conclusions from. After I was finished
torturing my children by keeping them in suspense far longer than they liked, I
removed their blindfolds and revealed the activity they were about to enjoy:
making gingerbread houses. Finally they understood how everything was
connected, and it all made perfect sense.
The fun I had with my kids can teach us a lesson about systems thinking. It is
impossible to know the behavior of a system just by knowing the parts that make
up that system. We have to dig deeper to understand the relationships between
those parts and the impact they have on the system as a whole. That is a central
tenant of systems thinking, and one we should never ignore.
No one thinking method is better than the others. There are times and places to
use them all. Systems thinking is not better than linear thinking. They are both
necessary for us to see and appreciate the world around us completely and in all
its complexity. Trying to only use one way of thinking is like going through the
world with one eye closed. It distorts our perception and limits what we can
accomplish. All ways of thinking are necessary in order for us to get the whole
picture. next part coming soon published by lucky
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