Day 5 of “7 Days to Systems-Thinking”: Oscillations
A link to the complete 7-day series on systems thinking is here …
Systems Thinking 101: The Magic of Systems Thinking
With the knowledge and skills you’ve picked up over the past few days, you will already be starting to see the events going on all around you in a different way. We’ve already talked about the unfolding of complexity of time, and specifically, how inflows and outflows work to create reinforcing or balancing feedback loops. In this session, we’re going to explore that in a little more detail and talk more about the effect of time on systems as well as some of the more important aspects of feedback loops …
Feedback Loops and Time Delays
As we’ve already mentioned, with complex systems such as organisations there are likely to be several components and several feedback loops operating all at once and from lots of different directions. When we introduce time delays into one or more of these feedback loops, systems start to become even more interesting.
Time delays are likely to exist in all kinds of systems. If you go to buy some food at your local store, for example, when you have selected what you want there will be a short delay while you wait in line to pay for your goods. In a manufacturing organisation, the processes surrounding the control of the stock levels of component parts are much more complex – requiring calculations based on the expected number of sales of the product, the number of parts therefore required, the most economic order quantity, the lead time that it will take suppliers to process and deliver the goods etc. – all so that the items are able to arrive “Just-In-Time”.
This system is even more complex that it would first appear, however, because our available stock of components parts is also being used up while we wait for a new delivery. Hence, a key principle when we examine the impact of time on systems is that stocks in the system are also likely to be changing as we attempt to manage them. Our mental models therefore need to take into account the impact that all flows are having whilst we are making any changes.
Using another example, if we want to increase headcount in a large organisation, we should also factor in to our calculation of the number of people we need to recruit the rate at which staff are likely to leave. Another key principle to bear in mind when we are working with systems is that feedback loops – whether these are to do with the ordering of more parts or the advertising of our new vacancies – can take quite some time to take effect. This makes the prediction of what is likely to happen with a system more difficult – particularly, when we are dealing with systems that involve people. (I’m always reminded of Alice in Wonderland’s attempt to play croquet with a live flamingo and hedgehog that turned out to be a very unpredictable game indeed. Such are the complexities of real life systems.)
Oscillation
The impact that time lags have on the system can also give the appearance that something entirely different is happening. As a result, the inaccurate mental models we may have of a system can lead us to totally misinterpret what is actually happening … and “we may be led to do precisely the wrong thing” (as noted by Stafford Beer in Designing Freedom, on the subject of oscillation).
When this happens, our actions can indeed have exactly the opposite effect we intended and we can throw the system wildly out of balance leading, in the examples, to a period of excess component parts or headcount followed by extended periods of unavailability.
On a consultancy assignment with a large manufacturing organisation some years ago, one of the most important interventions we made was to work with the Production Controller to encourage him to avoid requesting additional manual orders of stock when he became concerned at the potentially low levels of certain stock items. (His actions were throwing the entire stock and inventory system into wild oscillation.)
The difficulty of prediction is particularly difficult when it comes to the creation of models of very large, complex systems (like whole economies). The boom and bust cycles we have experienced are a symptom of this. These difficulties, as you are beginning to appreciate, are rather more difficult than we would hope and expect. As systems-thinkers, the complexity inherent in the systems all around us is more readily apparent … and by attempting to really map what is happening (using a variety of tools, techniques and methodologies) we are able to give ourselves the best possible chance of success.
Hence, difficult tasks such as attempting to map and predict the future are made easier with the benefit of systems-thinking. When our attempts to better understand our organisations (through the mapping of feedback loops, information flows and causal maps etc.) are combined with techniques such as scenario planning we are able to gain deeper insights in the nature of our organisations – as well as highlight a wide range of potential threats and opportunities that are usually missed. Scenario planning also enables us to search for clusters of activity – along with changes in the rate of “time delays” at a macro level – that can have a disproportionate effect on your business
Tomorrow, we’ll begin exploring interventions and the many forms that these can take.
Day 6 of this 7-day series is here … http://www.watt-works.com/systems-thinking/day-6-of-7-days-to-systems-thinking-interventions/
Tags: Alice In Wonderland, complexity, feedback, oscillation, prediction, scenario planning, Systems Thinking, time delays
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