The Circle of Life

I grew up in a rural community and enjoyed friendships with several boys and girls who lived on farms. Their lifestyles always intrigued me and it wasn’t until later on, as an adult, that I began to understand why. They seemed to have developed an understanding of, as described in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, “the cycles of cause and effect” that those of us who lived “in town” had no awareness of at all. I quote from a section of the field book. “They see the links among the milk the cow gives, the grass the cow eats, and the droppings which fertilize the fields. When a thunderstorm is on the horizon, even a small child knows to turn off the floodgate on a spring-water well, for fear that runoff carried downstream by the rains will foul it. They know that if they forget to turn off the gate, they’ll have to boil their water, or carry by bucket from far away. They easily accept a counterintuitive fact of life; the greatest floods represent the time when you must be most careful about conserving water.”

So too does the proud lion ruler, Mufasa, in the Walt Disney classic, The Lion King. By teaching his son Simba “the circle of life,” he is explaining the interrelationships between the forces of nature. He is demonstrating the ability, again from the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, “to pay attention to the world as if through a wide angle, not a telephoto lens, so you can see how actions interrelate with other areas of activity.

I once worked in a company where management created a “systems thinking team” and charged it with the task of examining the processes we used to do our work. Over and over we discovered paradoxes. The procedures we used to generate the highest productivity ultimately drained our resources most quickly. The harder the leadership used tactics to push the employees to obtain goals, the more they undermined the chances of achieving them.

Point #1 Understanding these paradoxes is what allows us to discover where to channel our energies in order to produce profound and sustainable change.

In its simplest form what we are talking about, in this context, when we use the term “systems,” are stories, simple stories, that when told describe a series of steps that complete a cycle. They all begin with an action, grass grows, which leads to another action, cows eat the grass, and on to another action, the cows produce fertilizer, which leads to grass growing, thus closing the loop.

Examples of what we are talking about abound. Look around in your own life. Have you ever done something that sets off a series of events that eventually leads you right back to the exact thing you were trying to avoid when you started? Sure you have and so have the organizations that you have been, or still are, a part of.

I feel strongly that if the leadership of organizations consciously develops the art of systems thinking with a critical number of their members, this team will begin telling one another different kinds of stories, stories that can change the collective understanding of the organization which, in turn, can change its operation.

Point #2 Putting together a team is imperative to getting good results from your systems thinking efforts. Good results in a complex system, as any company or organization is, depend on as many perspectives as possible. I think it would be safe to say that you would get many different perspectives, even of “The Lion King,” if you brought together an audience that included both young and old, city folks and country folks, male and female, etc., versus an audience of just yourself.

So, as emphasized in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, “a team of people that represent all the necessary functions in your organization, a team cleared from top management to propose cross-functional solutions, regardless of sensitivities and politics, a team that includes a variety of learning styles” is important.

If you would like some tips on getting a systems thinking group started or some simple techniques to use when your team of “systems thinkers” get together, please request in the comments space or email me at stu@simplegrowth.com.