When dealing with complex situations people look for a silver bullet: “If we can just find that high-leverage, that will fix the problem(s): everything will be OK.”
Looking for just one thing is a hangover from the reductionist mindset of the Industrial Age. Systems thinking is the practice of looking at the parts of a system, the interdependencies between the parts, and the whole that is created by the parts working together. Reductionist mindsets are good at looking at the parts of a system, taking them apart and optimizing them. We need to learn how to look at the interdependencies between the parts, as well as the whole that results.
Teams are generally set up to be responsible for specific parts of a system, so they often don’t consider the impacts of any changes they make to their parts on any other parts of the system. When teams start to consider the interdependencies between the parts during designs and subsequent revisions, they have a much better chance of creating fully functioning systems.
The benefit of systems thinking has been proven over and over again at such companies as:
· Ford Motor Company on numerous car designs and launches,
· Boeing Corporation & the 777 airplane design team,
· Harley-Davidson on their production floor,
· Shell Oil Company in understanding how to avert oil platform tragedies,
· Interface Technologies in how to shift their products to 100% recyclable commercial carpeting,
· HP generating fully recyclable inkjet printer cartridges,
· Intel when bringing up several simultaneous chip fab facilities, simultaneously,
· The former First Lady of the Bahamas in understanding the changing socio-economy & political environment in her country,
· The US Army in understanding the changing nature of wars rooted in terrorist practices,
· The Racine Public School District in understanding how to create a school system where every member of it is focused on scholastic improvement.
My next blog will talk about what these companies and organizations have learned to do to enable their successes with these very complex situations.
