A pause to reflect on Systems Thinking aka Dynamics Of and Between People Groups

The more I have learned about groups, teams, organisations, systems, group dynamics, games people play, culture, politics, constellations, physics and more, the more I realise there is even more to learn.

"system", "the game", "organisation", "culture", "politics", "group dynamics", "relationships" and more, are actually different words for more or less the same thing. And it is is a very big thing - a big area to explore and learn about. Interesting too, in my opinion! "leadership" and "teamwork" also fit into this space. Awareness is key.

Where to even begin? There are so many seemingly different schools of thought, and mastery, it’s pretty much dizzying and overwhelming. 

Quite honestly, the right answer seems to be - start wherever you are and keep learning. All of it is really useful in a myriad of ways you cannot predict until you have contemplated the new “angle” you’re looking from. This one really is, "the more the merrier"!

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes." - Marcel Proust

In the Five Dimensions of Leadership (Development) Coaching framework (http://5dl.co.uk/), “systems thinking” is the 3rd dimension. That encouraged me even more to commit to the 4.5 years of study, client hours, supervision hours and thesis. Little did I know at the start that I was going to be taught about systems using my underdeveloped intuition. But I don’t think developing intuition is enough - how do you convince colleagues or leaders that they should consider doing something else - "because my intuition told me so"?

I prefer to use the term “systems appreciation” rather than systems thinking, because not all of “systems” type stuff is in the rational domain of the mind. Some of it is in the emotive and intuitional domain too. We can’t see them, but we can feel them. Like standing inside a building and watching a tree outside moving like a crazy thing. We can’t see the wind blowing, but we can notice the effects of the blowing wind. So for me, “appreciation” encompasses it all.

So, here’s an unstructured set “golden nuggets" that I’ve learned along the way that shaped my thinking a lot, usually after some kind of attempt that did not quite go as I thought, planned or hoped it would. Reflect on them individually or collectively, and see what happens:

• Always, always, return to the whole (imagined) picture of the organisation, the marketplace, the whole context of whatever you’re in. “this is for the greater good”
• Paradoxes are excellent - find them and make them explicit. They are the keys to unlocking "stuff"
• Optimising only one part of a system, often has unintended sub-optimal effects in other parts, resulting in a decline of the entire system’s performance
• Bottlenecks! Find them! Do something about them! BUT always beware that if you solve one obvious bottleneck you might be exposing your system to far worse, far more costly issues or bottlenecks elsewhere. Imagine driving a car very slowly over speed bumps and potholes. Now imagine removing the first 10 meters of those bumps and holes … and driving the car much faster at the same old bumps and holes. The first drive is slow and annoying. The second drive destroys your car.
• It is useful to start contemplating things at your own personal individual space, then expand to the group you’re in, department, organisation, industry, region and global context
• Fix the system not the people: it’s easier, quicker, cheaper and a lot less disruptive
• The system is always perfect - if you don’t like what it produces, the outcomes, the outputs, then change the system until you do
• There is no system, there are just the invisible mindsets of the people who, when they come together, produce the system effects we can notice
• Systemic causes of failure - carefully identify the root causes of failure that you detect. If they are systemic, change the system
• Special causes of failure - carefully identify the root causes of failure that you detect. If they are special causes, do not change the system
• Treating system causes of failure as if they are special cause, causes more failure
• Treating special causes of failure as if they are systemic cause, causes more process, more policy, and ultimately more failure
• To change systems, according to Dr Shewart, Plan-Do-Study-Adjust (the system) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_A._Shewhart)
• To change systems, according to Dr Shewart’s student, Dr Deming, Plan-Do-Check-Act (on the system) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA)
• To change systems, according to Dr Cockburn and his Heart of Agile framework, Collaborate-Deliver-Reflect-Improve (https://heartofagile.com/)
• Causal modelling is useful, and is only really effective with a representative subset of the entire organisation as together they will form a miniature version of the organisation and the map that is produced will be helpful
• It is the act of modelling, discussing, clarifying, checking and interacting that is the true benefit of causal modelling (or any mapping workshop, for that matter) - it builds a common language, a common understanding and thus is beneficial for building a team!)
• Temporal pondering - think about the thing that is happening now, think about what was happening before that could have resulted in the thing happening now, and think about what would happen if you changed the thing in the future - how do all these changes/versions of the thing impact all the things it is connected to
• Small changes sometimes (usually) have the best impacts - think about a bicycle rider, lots and lots of small adjustments are happening all the time to keep balance and momentum in sync and achieve intended outcomes
• It’s easier to learn systems thinking with other people, than to learn it from a book. Just discussing it is learning it
• You don’t need to be perfect at any of it, to get major benefits
• An organisation redesign temporarily seems to affect system forces, but usually they reassert
• Even changing a significant number of people involved in a organisation dynamic does not change the dynamic for very long
• It takes WILL to change a system (all the qualities, stages and activities of WILL that is)
• One person can change a system if they try hard enough, never give up, and are able to annoy everyone else enough. But as soon as they are not there, the original system re-asserts. (think of a mosquito in a room full of sleeping people)
• Immersing people in simulation training of various systemic contexts outside of the normal BAU, that have the same basic backbone as their usual BAU, is far more effective in creating a change than random simulations that they can’t relate to or take learnings back to the office from.
• Systems thinking requires reflecting often
• https://amzn.to/2zpIArQ - "The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization: Second edition” by Peter Senge
• https://amzn.to/3F4o91R - "Seeing Systems” by Barry Oshry
• https://amzn.to/3oRzidt - "Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking” by Dennis Sherwood
• https://amzn.to/3F21IeQ - “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn
• https://amzn.to/3HhtLan - "Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together” by William Isaacs, who studied under the real expert who could not fully translate the profound truth he had discovered to more normal talking: David Bohm - https://amzn.to/3Cgpa76 - "On Dialogue”
• https://amzn.to/41Kn1KR - "The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli - was an eye-opener, but do not blindly believe everything he advises on
• 9 minute video: https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast - "Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast” - Tom Wujec. Many deep implications!

And many more, but sadly time is up for now! The system calls...

A pause to reflect on Prioritisation aka Time Management

“Water flows in the direction of downhill”, means that we prefer to do the things we prefer - because we have skill and/or interest to do them.

I love these seemingly simple single word words like “prioritisation” which seem to mask several layers of what it means to be a human being. Even double word labels like "human being" is an over-simplification - we’re made of several energy sources, bacterias, organisms, viruses, cells, and much more - basically millions/billions/trillions of structures, relationships, dependencies, interfaces and communication paths between them, forming a cooperative that is not fully aware of itself. Ever really, really seen the back of your elbow, or your neck? Are you SURE it is really there?

Come on, try something - try get your heart to beat on your conscious demand. Unless you’re an extremely trained and practiced guru yogi, no one else really seems able to. Or try something simpler - hold your breath until you can’t. Something re-asserts. Something wants to live, and overrules your thought to hold your breath. Okay, so some people - usually young folks - hold their breath until they blackout, AND THEN that part that wants to live, forces breathing again. 

There really is something else going on out of reach of the conscious mind.

So now we’re ready to get into prioritisation.

How hard is it to pick a strategy to follow?

How hard is it to choose to turn left or right, when you just do not know?

Or to pick a candy in a candy store when you have not tried them all and can only buy 1?

Letting go of one or more options is incredibly hard - one of those might be “the one!” and you lost, you chose to lose, that option. That’s inviting anxiety, terror, worry, tension, unhappiness, confusion and a myriad other difficult emotions to carry. It’s vulnerability. What if you are wrong?

Of course … life carries on, and likely you will never find out that you were wrong. It’s also likely that you do find out AND there’s still time to change your mind. But according to the Principles of Persuasion - the principle of consistency, sticking to our previous decision basically, has a nasty subconscious way of not letting us change our minds, even to the detriment of ourselves sometimes. Awareness, self awareness, and awareness of as much as possible is really helpful!

So ultimately, in a competitive landscape, the ones choosing and moving, and learning, and being quicker, have more luck (luck == opportunity meets preparation) than those who are not choosing. It’s better to prioritise and know that you’re working on priority 1, then moving to priority 2 which becomes priority 1, than try to do 20 things all at once. For many reasons and many models and many simulations. Topics for  other posts perhaps.

There is no procrastination… there’s just choice which might be trapped. How would you know? You learn more about yourself, and you look at ways of self development to help you grow your self awareness. You make one decision, and take one small step in the direction of achieving the thing that is most important, not the easiest thing. Time management, is a reflection of what you actually believe is important.

Here’s a quick test of your self awareness (which is also a self development exercise, so reflect, take notes, and review again later for more reflections):

   Compare what you would do if you were a life-saving surgeon and two unconscious 40 year old men arrived in your emergency room. Both had exactly the same wound, the same prognosis to live or die if they received your life saving care or not. You need to begin immediately for one of these patients to live. Unfortunately whoever is not operated on will die.

How do you choose?

Now, consider: one of the men is the Siddhartha Gautama (aka) Buddhai and the other man is … Elon Musk.

These kinds of questions cause all sorts of known information to surface, and all sorts of beliefs too. Sometimes comfortable and sometimes not. But the more awareness you have of all of your inner world(s), the more you begin to truly understand prioritisation.

Notice what happens when you change the names to Elon Musk and Bill Gates (both at 40!!); Elon Musk and Neil Armstrong? Minnie Mouse or Mickey Mouse? (yes cartoons characters are real too!). And so on. As many names, genders, ages, people close to you, people far away from you. See what comes up for you as you consider these impossible choices. Many personal values, beliefs, attitudes, and more will come up the more you do this simple exercise.

A related aside:

Strategising and selecting strategy is the art of saying “No” to many options, to reduce scope, which reduces complexity essentially. This increases probability of success - as there are fewer variables you need to consider, to balance, to get to success.

Planning and committing is the art of turning the goals and constraints that result from strategy selection, into the art of the possible, which then increasingly becomes a new reality - the future.

Prioritisation is deciding which variables you’re going to work with now, and which you will work with later. The fewer variables it turns out, the easier it is to do this with much less anxiety and greater chances of success. Both complexity and psychological safety matter in this space, a lot!

In effect, explicit and strongly (enough) held boundaries between things, make more safety and less complexity possible, thus less stress and much more creativity can occur within those safe spaces. Boundaries == safety, safe to be together and try unknown things together. 

A pause to reflect on Complexity

Or, as a friend of mine says it: “no one really understands complexity!"

Some foundation ideas:

1. There is some complexity in everything, everyone, everywhere, everywhen, and everyhow - at a certain point you cannot reduce complexity further, no matter what you do
2. To deal with complexity, we need to find a new perspective, this simplification
3. There is great stress relief whenever we are able to find and act on simplifying anything that is complex. And relieving stress is always better for health.
4. As the number of variables increases, so does complexity
5. As the number of variations/changes in those variables increases, so does complexity
6. As the frequency/speed of changes in those variables increases, so does complexity
7. Complexity is cause-and-effect but it reaches a point where we cannot reliably predict the effects (desirable and unintended, undesirable) of a cause; so too there is a point where we cannot reliably identify root causes of an effect we observe
8. Complexity is not evil, it just is
9. For anything to be really interesting to us / people / individuals we need a balance of certainty and uncertainty - else it gets boring and non-rewarding
10. Complexity rises exponentially, so 1 unit of complexity added to another 1 unit of complexity equals more than 2 units, maybe 3 (probably), but maybe also 4 or 5 units. Who can tell? Certainly not beforehand!
11. An individual person can only handle / cope with / manage so much complexity. Once their “buffers” are full, that’s it. And each person’s max complexity management is unique
12. A high performance team can cope with more complexity, than the individual members can independently. Teams cope better with, and cope with more complexity than groups. And groups too, can sometimes cope with more than individuals operating alone do. Synergy is really a thing.
13. Yes, VUCA - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is a useful acronym to use to help you identify your assessment of a situation
14. Yes, the Stacey Matrix is also useful in software and other complex spaces.
15. Yes, the Cynefin model is also useful in complex spaces.

Anecdote 1: 

“Complicated is like a diesel submarine - we know a lot about submarines, and given a submarine we could pull it all apart, making carefully detailed plans, and once all apart, we could reassemble it using our plans and all the pieces we have. Complexity however is like mayonnaise … it does not matter how you slice, dice and analyse mayonnaise, you still have mayonnaise”

1. You will never be able to return mayonnaise to its original ingredients (egg yolks, salt, pepper, mustard, oil, vinegar/lemon juice) by analysing it, decomposing it, slicing it or dicing it
2.  You could take mayonnaise into a lab and chemically and with heat do something with it, to produce protein, water, acid, some salts, some carbon, and a few other chemicals - but you will not get the ingredients again. And it cost you a lot of time and money to get there. And with these more basic “ingredients” you will not be able to reconstruct the mayonnaise you had - something will have been lost.

Anecdote 2:

“Simple is like me tying my shoelaces. I have been doing this for more than 4 decades, I am quite comfortable and confident to do the action. If a project manager or sponsor asked me for a time (which is also cost) estimate, I could easily say “30 seconds approximately” and be believable, believed and probably get the budget to complete the project on time, on budget, right scope and right quality.

Complicated is like me tying the shoelaces of a room of 16-20 people. When I estimate “30 seconds per person, plus 5-15 seconds to move between people, plus a buffer of 10% of the total estimate to cater for unfamiliar shoe or shoestring options and also for 5% for some fatigue” - is also believable, and can be believed, might need to be negotiated a little to understand and cater for risks, might be considered a bit expensive but overall, probably a goer and could get budget to complete this complicated project on time or earlier, on budget or cheaper, right scope, and also right quality.

Then there is complexity. That’s like me being asked to tie the shoelaces of everyone in the corporate headquarters building. Multiple floors, multiple rooms, thousands of people. Other variables show up quickly “What if people leave before I reach them? What if people arrive after I left that space? What if everyone goes home before I am done? Or I break my fingers, knees or back? Or someone accidentally kicks me in the face and breaks my nose or glasses?” and many many more “What if?” questions arise. Faced with all this, the estimate I create could be extremely large, the caveats wide reaching, and the buffers enormous, and so usually the project is abandoned before it is funded or started. Good business!

However, in complexity there is risk of failure AND also possibility of success and reward! It’s a bit of anxiety AND excitement. And when we are in the right balance of psychological safety, and subjected to the energies of anxiety and excitement, sometimes we get an insight, and inspiration to do something previously not thought or considered. For example … locking the whole building and installing me at the 1 open door / security access point. That way everyone entering has well tied shoelaces, guaranteed. And we can measure progress rate. If it is too slow, and the sponsor deems that the project must be done regardless, suddenly we have the accurate business case of how many more people to hire, and how many more points to open. As the queue outside the building, block, whole neighbourhood dwindles, we can get pretty specific about when we will finish at the current rate of progress, and even begin to figure out when we can start rolling people off the project to save costs.

And .. this is the agile project management approach, in case you were wondering where I got this from :-) Years of training people to understand complexity and why agility mindsets are very useful to have! We find innovation arises more frequently from complex problem spaces, requiring complex solutions, when such contexts are managed according to the principles of change and resolution.

Simple projects are best executed like we did such projects before - very efficiently and effectively, basically rinse and repeat - the essence of manufacturing and traditional project management methods such as APMP and PRINCE2 (projects in controlled environments). Complicated projects are sometimes best suited to traditional project management methods, and sometimes to agile project management methods - it depends on who is available, what they know, and what else is really available - beliefs and experience do matter.

A pause to reflect on Psychological Safety - How Free Am I

How can you really know that you are psychologically safe?

Most people detect and experience the absence of safety, not the presence of it.

If your normal is “abnormal” then the ability to notice something other, is severely subconsciously restricted. And your mind, your rational thinking and knowing tool, cannot tell the difference. If you're accustomed to a perpetual state of preparation for the unknown - maybe even living with a continuous "stress" response due to multiple little stressors continuously going off all around you, then it's unlikely that you're going to be feeling the variations due to the cortisol, adrenaline and testosterone flowing all through you without your conscious awareness of them.

If, by now, you don’t know when you are psychologically safe or not, then read on. :) This is the gist of what I have learned firsthand in the workplace, on experiential courses, from life, from resources and from other people’s descriptions. For the past 13 years specifically, but reflectively since pre-teen years.

So, let’s start with an easy step of this short journey together.

Here is a phrase with deep significance - please don’t read over it - instead actually pause and reflect on it. Read it once with the mind, and again with the heart: 

“If you are in the picture, you cannot see the frame”

Notice, perhaps, if you’re comfortable with this, or not.

Then, a short description of a little goldfish, in a little bowl:

• It does not know it is in a little bowl - that is it’s entire universe
• Every now and again, it bumps up against a barrier - which may be visible or invisible, but for sure, it’s not going past that barrier
• It does not know about wider waters, wild waters, predators, or even what it might eat in the wild
• It possibly does not even know that it is breathing water (in the similar way that we humans forget or disregard that we are also breathing a substance, called air. It’s not nothing, it is definitely something)

Again, notice, perhaps, if you’re comfortable with this, or not.

If you want more, I highly recommend reading up on a much older story, Plato’s Cave, or more correctly, The Allegory of the Cave. Here’s a good explanation: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/allegory-of-the-cave-explainede 

So, back to my post's title then: You could be in: 

• In a group, old or new; or
• With your manager, colleague, customer, stakeholder; or
• With a person you just met, a friend, a family member

Ask yourself a little question and see what happens to your thoughts, your feelings, your body.

Ask yourself “How free am I?”  

Here are some variations:

• How free am I to <ask this person, this group, for help>?
• How free am I to <tell the other person they make me angry>?
• How free am I to <leave this room, without saying another word>?
• How free am I to <put my idea out openly>?
• How free am I to <have my idea crushed if I put it out openly>?
• How free am I to <have my idea crushed, if I put it out openly, to tell the others what it is like to have my idea crushed by them, and to leave this room without saying another word>?
• How free am I to <say No, without a reason>?
• How free am I to <say No, with a reason>?
• How free am I to <say Yes, with a reason>?

Notice, when you pause on your question in the moment, what comes back via your mind, via your feelings and emotions, and what response your body has. These are just additional sources of information, which you can use to make your conscious decision and then act thoughtfully.

Sometimes, we can notice that we are not 100% free, and that’s okay, just the fact that we know that, and can then still more consciously work within our non-free, non-safe context, helps us to be free. And being free is a major contributor to holistic health. 

In the case of psychological safety, noticing that perhaps we are not entirely free, helps us to then frame a question, or a statement, that we can share with other people, balancing risk vs reward, and that could cause the group or the relationship we have with the other, to strengthen.

“How free am I?” is a great litmus test for psychological safety. What you do with the result of it, can actually create amazing experiences for yourself and others. Please try it, and let me know how what shifted for you when you did!