The Systems Thinking Approach

A leader who understands systems thinking has a better chance of getting to the root of problems within the organization. Systems thinking often produces quite different results, because it is able to look more effectively for root causes. As an example, take an organization is in conflict, and has a pattern of conflict repeated over long periods of time.

Organizations are sometimes like long-running plays, where the major actors change but the underlying plots stay the same. When there’s a pattern, rather than asking who’s right and who’s wrong in the present conflict, the leader asks “How does this organization encourage such polarizing to happen?” Then the organization can begin to change the structures of how people relate and how information flows, rather than succumbing to the temptation of removing one or parties in the current conflict. By focusing on who’s at fault now, the underlying pattern remains — and the conflict will re-emerge, sooner or later, with only the players changed.

The approach of systems thinking is fundamentally different from that of traditional forms of analysis. Traditional analysis focuses on the separating the individual pieces of what is being studied; in fact, the word “analysis” actually comes from the root meaning “to break into constituent parts.” Systems thinking, in contrast, focuses on how the thing being studied interacts with the other constituents of the system—a set of elements that interact to produce behavior—of which it is a part. This means that instead of isolating smaller and smaller parts of the system being studied, systems thinking works by expanding its view to take into account larger and larger numbers of interactions as an issue is being studied.

The Systems Thinking Approach