Systems Thinking

Your next competitive edge

Imagine for a moment that a friend followed you with a webcam and recorded every moment of your typical work day. What could you learn from so much data? Probably not much, unless you matched each video frame with a related task. Once you did, however, you could pinpoint areas for improvement by comparing your activities on video with the expected minimal requirements (time and money) to complete each task.

The clinical engineering term used to describe this comparative analysis is called “systems thinking,” where choices for a set of outcomes are optimized using benchmark data. For non-engineers, systems thinking could be described as an exercise in time management or an example of how a person should best maneuver while driving through rush-hour traffic. Surprisingly, if you are not an engineer but know how to drive effectively in traffic, you may be a more intuitive expert on systems thinking than you realize.

So, what is systems thinking, and why should CEOs view it as their next competitive edge for years to come?

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Comments

Very Different

Maybe I'm missing something, but this video suggestion seems to be a completely different view of "systems thinking," in stark contrast to the usual concepts from the general systems theory originated by von Bertalanffy and further developed by Jay Forrester, Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge, Fritjof Capra, Jamshid Gharadjedaghi and others, and promoted by Deming as one of the four components of his System of Profound Knowledge. From that point of view, I would think that the video is only about systems thinking if it somehow captures all the interactions you have with the system, and allows you to see how you fit in as part of the whole. It would have to keep you from making any local changes that might optimize your local performance but suboptimize the larger system.

It's not that I think the video idea is necessarily bad...you could no doubt uncover lots of bad habits, and certainly help your own performance. It just sounds a lot more like basic process analysis than systems thinking, to me.

I agree; the article is more

I agree; the article is more about the vicious fiction of personal performance; and not the system that the person/s work in to achieve the organisation's mission. So, completely wrong-headed!

But the author is right in pointing to systems thinking as the source of organisation performance. Top management has to see the organisation as a total mission orientated system that facilitiates people achieving mission oriented outcomes: typically this means serving the customer.

One rule of thumb for a system oriented business is: no voice recognition call centre merry go rounds; but customers dealing with people who solve their problem or meet their need.