Day 6 of “7 Days to Systems-Thinking”: Interventions

A link to the complete 7-day series on systems thinking is here …
Systems Thinking 101: The Magic of Systems Thinking

With the concepts that we’ve covered so far in this series, you’ll now be able to more easily identity events that are parts of trends, and certain issues as symptoms of an underlying inappropriate system structure.

So, what is this all leading to? Well, the concepts that we’ve covered are now enough to lead you through the remaining parts of the dark and dense forest, out into an open clearing. Well done for getting this far. Take a look back now at the forest you’ve just come through.

The journey that you’ve undertaken so far, will enable you to make use of this new-found knowledge in a variety of exciting and surprising ways.

Interventions

The information that you now have about systems means that you are better able to make interventions to systems than ever before. You won’t always make the right interventions, however. Systems always have the ability to surprise us. If any of this has you yearning for more, you’ll be pleased to know that a passion for systems-thinking lasts a lifetime. There’s always more to learn and more things to discover.

Interventions in systems can take many forms. In a later series on the Viable System Model (VSM), I’ll say a great more about “variety” and its importance for understanding complexity. For now though, I’ll just say that interventions will have the effect of either attenuating (i.e. reducing) or amplifying complexity.

“Why would amplifying complexity ever be a good thing?” I hear you ask. Well, if you’re dealing with a very complex environment (i.e. market) that demands multiple variations of your product or service, you would do well to increase the variety of products or services you can provide to your customers, or otherwise risk lost opportunity and reduced market share.

On the other hand, when you’re dealing with a very complex environment, then you might have a number of options to segment your market (perhaps by demographic or by geographic location). This will give you a better chance of communicating in the right way at the right time with the people in those segments.

The trick, is to know when to amplify and when to attenuate (or, indeed, when to do a bit of both).

From the perspective of systems structure, the appropriate intervention is one that recognises and addresses in some way those aspects of the structure that are destructive and limiting and alters it in order to encourage and facilitate behaviour and characteristics that are useful and beneficial.

Talking with a couple of systems-thinking practitioners and consultants this morning, we lamented the tendency of various schools of thought to favour a one-size-fits-all approach. Sadly, the one-size-fits-all approach is rarely adequate, constrains choice, restricts actions, and is entirely opposite to a true systems-thinking approach. Nuff said.

System Structures – Resilience and Learning

When we view systems as structures there are usually particular kinds of structures that emerge. There are a surprisingly small number of specific structures and patterns of systems that we tend to find – and these are usually called “archetypes”. More about these tomorrow. For now, I wanted to focus your attention on a particular set of structures that are particularly interesting – those relating to resilience and learning.

A formal definition of resilience is “the property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed” (Answers.com Dictionary). When we examine the structure of systems that have resilience, we usually find the presence of a number of balancing feedback loops that bring the system back to a specific desired state.

Mapping the structure of a system allows us to see where the feedback loops exist – and more usefully … where we would benefit from adding new ones.

Try this little thought experiment. Take a piece of uncooked spaghetti. Bend it.

It snaps. Right?

Now, take a piece of cooked spaghetti and bend it. What happens? The structure remains in tact, and the spaghetti is able to retain its overall shape.

This is resilience in action.

Now … let’s say your organisation has been undergoing a series of failed change exercises for a number of years (this applies to pretty much most organisations). One of the most under-valued interventions that can radically transform organisations (along with ensuring that your staff can participate in the dialogue that exists to determine the direction of your organisation) is to equip them with a set of mental skills and mental models that allow them to deal with a wide range of things better. This includes things like managing stress, managing conflict, managing anxiety, dealing with change, improving the way they communicate with each other, improving the way they think about and look after themselves etc. In other words … doing things that improve their ability to be buffeted by the winds of change.

Lao Tse understood this when he wrote the Tao te Ching over 2,500 years ago …

Just as a sapless tree will split and decay
,
So an inflexible force will meet defeat;

The hard and mighty lie beneath the ground

While the tender and weak dance on the breeze above.

-Tao te Ching, Lau Tse

As individuals, the moment we become stiff and unyielding in our approaches or attitudes, we lose our flexibility, resilience and ability to adapt. In terms of system structure, facilitating resilience means restoring or increasing the strength of our balancing loops in order create a “meta-state” of resilience.

A similar structure emerges when we consider the structure of the learning organisation (and well documented by Chris Argyris as part of his ideas on double-loop learning, among others). This double-loop learning refers to the ability to learn to change our underlying values and assumptions … in effect, learning how to learn. So from a similar perspective, any system intervention we can make that strengthens and improves the ability of the system to recognise difference, act on it, and update its own model of itself … has to be a good thing does it not?

For me, there is a particularly interesting area of overlap here between systems-thinking and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It was Alfred Korzybski that first coined the term “the map is not the territory” (way back in the early 1930s). This phrase – now a core part of NLP – refers to the idea that our language, conceptual understanding, causal mapping, beliefs, values and world-view are all based on our perception of reality, rather than reality itself.

A realisation of this at a deep level is, for most, a journey to a land of richer understanding. The exploration of the overlap and systems-thinking and NLP is – for me at least – a fascinating world.

Constructing Our Models

So, in order for us to figure out where we should best apply our interventions, we need to “map” our understanding of the system we are concerned with. Here, there are a few principles to consider, and a few questions we need to ask ourselves …

First of all, what level of the system are you going to map? How sure are you that you are mapping at the right level? Where are we drawing the boundaries of the system? Do we need to make the boundary of the system under consideration wider? How detailed should our feedback loops be? Do we need to plot every single feedback loop and stock? And so on.

Certain people will have a tendency to document every single aspect of the system under question, and spend many days and weeks doing it. Others will do the opposite.

The best possible piece of advice I can give you in this are the words of Stafford Beer : “A model is neither true nor false; it is more or less-useful” (from Diagnosing the System for Organisations).

The trick is, again, to find the right balance.

Tools to Use

There are a very wide variety of tools and techniques available within the systems-thinking world to help you map your systems of focus. These include causal loop diagrams, rich picture diagrams, cognitive maps etc. The general idea is that you choose the most appropriate digram for the context you are working in.

What is important here is that you attempt to document the system under focus. Again, the idea is not to produce the exact representation of reality (because that could really take quite some time). It is, instead, to arrive at an understanding of the system that is useful, and one that allows you to begin working through the possible implications of any potential intervention you might want to make.

Interventions

So, yesterday, I suggested that today we would explore some of the possible forms that intervention could take. Now we’ve got to this point, and covered all the ground we needed to, this really won’t take much longer.

The kinds of interventions you can make are really very wide indeed. These might include adding, amending or removing different types of feedback loops, changing feedback loops, reducing (or increasing) time lags, amending the structure of the system, moving elements around and a whole host of other possibilities.

Again, what is important here is that you adhere to the principles we’ve discussed so far in this series. Where you can enhance the integrity of the system to ensure that the system becomes self-organising, self-repairing, resilient and capable of learning how to learn …. all of these things will significantly improve the ability of your system (team, department, organisation etc.) to perform effectively.

Tomorrow, the last day in this series … we’ll bring all of this together.

The final day of this 7-day series is here … http://www.watt-works.com/systems-thinking/day-7-of-7-days-to-systems-thinking-bringing-it-all-together/

Tags: Argyris, balance, causal loop diagrams, complexity, double-loop learning, feedback, intervention, Korzybski, learning, model, resilience, rich picture, Stafford Beer, structure, Systems Thinking, Tao te Ching, tools, variety, VSM