Looking for a silver bullet; needing a systems approach

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.

Systems Thinking

By Jean Tully

On June 4, at Saybrook University in San Francisco, an introductory 4-hour presentation on a valuable systems thinking method will be offered through the Bay Area Society for Organizational Learning. This introduction will be followed by a 2-day workshop in July

Why is Systems Thinking important? It helps you see interconnections and interdependencies, and ultimately manage complexity better.

What can it help you with in today’s increasingly complex organizational settings? It helps you anticipate unintended consequences, make changes that stick, and manage multiple levels of complexity.

A recent 2010 study by IBM of 1541 Global CEO’s identified “complexity… as their primary challenge; and, a surprising number of them told us that they feel ill-equipped to succeed in this drastically different world.” (www.ibm.com/CEOStudy)

If CEO’s are feeling the pressures of complexity at their level, imagine what the Directors, Program/Project Managers, individual contributors are feeling down in the trenches? With outsourcing, off-shoring, and right-sizing as cost-cutting strategies, teams are distributed across continents, time zones, cultures, languages, operating paradigms , processes/procedures, and leadership norms. The thinking and management practices that have created the organizations of today are no longer sufficient to deal with these levels of complexity, brought on by the pressure for ever-increasing monthly and quarterly results through these cost-cutting strategies.

Einstein said:
The thinking that created today’s problems cannot be the thinking that will also solve them.

Most of today’s leaders have advanced through the ranks using the traditional, linear thinking that made the Industrial Age of the 20th century so successful. Divide and conquer; optimize the parts; ensure quality control and consistency. Because teams were more often co-located, it was easier to work out problems that arose between the parts.

It is a different world now from 50, 30, even 10 years ago, with global interconnectivity, parts being built in distributed locations and then brought together for assembly, social networking becoming marketing tools, 3-4 generations of employees working together (each generation with its own set of values and drivers for success).

Systems thinking is valuable because people at all levels and backgrounds can work with a complex issue, find leverage points for change, and create actions to support moving the system toward a desired future state. In systems thinking you consider the parts of a system, the interrelationship between the parts, and the whole that is created by the combination. What is often missed in traditional process improvement efforts is the interrelationship between the parts, and the beliefs and assumptions held by the members of the system about how it could, should, and would operate, if only . . .

The method of systems thinking to be offered June 4th uses the stories of the system to evaluate the current situation and future opportunities. This method maps the underlying structures that drive system performance, the interrelationships between those structures, the beliefs and assumptions driving people’s actions, the leverage points for change, and creates an action plan to resolve the structural tensions and breakdowns, generating the desired system of the future.

Join us June 4th in San Francisco and bring a complex issue you are dealing with to explore.

Captivate/Articulate

As a start-up company, our enterprise relies on good tools to create online learning, which is one of our core capabilities as part of a suite of offerings we provide to help people work together collaboratively.

We had chosen Adobe’s ELearning Suite as our vehicle for online learning development. Over the last month, Captivate and the ELearning Suite were problematic at every turn. Adding PhotoShop layered files lost critical visual elements. Running quiz previews crashed the system over and over. Navigation was stodgy; flash animation was rudimentary.

Although Adobe tech support was on the spot and helpful, there was no good solution to the problems we encountered. Captivate has community support, but the community is out-of-date, with the exception of a few wide-awake and talented people. Captain Captivate was especially helpful when I tweeted him, and he got back to me quickly with an understanding of the problems that had us mired in technology mud.

In desperation and with a deadline looming ever closer, we turned to Articulate, and it seemed to have great finesse with PowerPoint integration, keeping graphic elements separate so we could work with them. Articulate has a robust and vital community of Articulate experts. They are responsive, proactive, and provide helpful support.

Still, our design and development team missed the time line functionality of Captivate. The time line is useful for developing a learning program so that it moves forward and keeps the learner engaged. We also found we need the integration of the Adobe products such as Sound Booth, PhotoShop, Flash, and Bridge.

It came down to a choice between two quite adequate online learning suites of programs, one with a long-term possibility of integrating with the Creative Suite on the Mac, the other with good functionality, but not the best solution for our long-term goals and immediate business direction. Our decision to go with Adobe Captivate is largely due to the dangling carrot of a pending release of Captivate 5, e-Learning Suite 2 and future Mac integration. The new features in this upgrade appear to be solutions to the shortcomings of the current version of Captivate 4. However, with a general release date of June 2010… we’re left in technology limbo!

As the clock continues to click towards project deadlines, we find it necessary to go forward using using the ill-fated Captivate 4 in a Windows environment, which is plagued with numerous bugs and incompatibilities. This short term work-flow required an investment in hardware, upgraded operating systems, and a move away from our beloved Macs. With our fingers crossed and list of work-a-rounds, we move forward creating an online employee development program that is a fabulous program. We have a vision of how it is suppose to be… and a commitment to complete the project sooner than technology glitches will allow. The tools we have chosen must help get us there!