Inventing Elephants

The Same Story Retold

Beth Robinson — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:06:27 +0000

Most books and movies can be boiled down to one of a handful of plots. The surprises and excitement lie in the details and in the way the story unfolds.

Destructive systems are similarly predictable, following familiar story lines across different situations, industries, and environments on both large and small scales. Donella Meadows describes 8 of the most common archetypes in Thinking in Systems and caps off each story with a way to get out of the trap set by the plot.

These are:

Policy Resistance - tug of war and we all fall down
The Tragedy of the Commons - overuse via self-interest
Drift to Low Performance -continually lowering your expectations
Escalation - she poked me so I'll poke her harder
Success to the Successful - I won, so now I have money to help me win next time
Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor - You're not helping me enough
Rule Beating - It's what you said, but doesn't get to where you meant
Seeking the Wrong Goal - the system did exactly what you asked, oops

But my favorite is Success to the Successful, because it hardly seems like a trap.

I mean, if you do well at something, maybe make some money, then it makes sense that you should be able to invest what you earned into doing even better at the next thing. It's how you grow a business or get better at your hobbies.

But it's a trap when there is a scarcity of resources, perhaps even if that scarcity is only mental. Each time the successful person gets a little more and gets a little better it becomes that much harder for the unsuccessful person to catch up to them. It happens in the game of Monopoly, where the first person who's able to start charging more and higher rents starts pulling ahead.

When we stay in one mode of thinking, there is scarcity on a larger scale. Poor children in poor areas end up with poor education, making it harder for them to reach a higher standard of living. Land is owned unevenly. Businesses tend to grow larger and are eventually restrained only by anti-trust laws.

When the poor get poorer it's sad from a moral point of view and also poses a danger that those societies or individuals will eventually get frustrated enough in their hopelessness to violently reset the game. Meadows recommends a couple more peaceful ways to level the playing field, such as taxation and gift-giving traditions.

One she didn't bring up is changing the rules. That's why this archetype attracted me. It reminded me of the set-up for disruptive innovations and how tiny businesses can overtake established ones and become wildly successful, sometimes. They changed the game and somehow increased the number of resources available in a way that wasn't directly intended to limit the wealth of the other players. Expanding the concept outside of the business world is a little more complex, but I would expect that changing the way we think still has the potential to provide other ways out of this trap by fostering abundance instead of scarcity.

All eight archetypes are found in Chapter Five: System Traps ... and Opportunities. This post is the seventh in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems. Also read my other posts:

Book Review: Thinking in Systems
What is a System?
Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
Why Systems Surprise Us
The Same Story Retold
at least two more to follow...

Bits and Pieces - May and June 2009

Beth Robinson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:00:38 +0000

A few things that caught my attention while I was wasn't blogging... mostly variations on thinking methods.

Design Thinking

Lessons Learned - Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking really hit home for me. I had noticed the overlap between the two and was fascinated by Fred Collopy's vantage point as being a student of both.

Essentially he points out that systems thinking requires mastering many similar disciplines and also following an arbitrary set of shared defintions, but that we learn best, and are most excited by learning, when we can jump in and try things out.

The key suggestion is to make design thinking approachable by creating within it a collection of useful tools that do NOT depend on each other. I wonder if this could also be done for systems thinking, or if that would defeat the point.

If you go read the article, make sure to follow the discussion into the comments. The're worth the extra time.

Systematic Inventive Thinking

This post about becoming greener is also about cognitive fixedness, a precise term to describe having a mental block. The three ways that the SIT team recommends to break it up are to:

recognize the limitation
accept that underlying assumptions can be changed
be flexible about relationships between elements

They have their own blog and a company site by the same name. It's apparently a way to approach innovation, step by step, using systems in the sense of having a regular process. I'd like to a little more closely at their ways to come up with something new.

Natural Systems Thinking Process

I had no idea there was anything called ecopsychology. This article popped up because I have a google alert on "systems thinking" but the only part of NSTP that seems familiar is the idea of everything being interconnected, instead it focuses more on the emotional and natural aspects of the "web of life" and not on increasing understanding overall.

Resilience Thinking

Much of this article flew by me, but I caught enough to want to follow up on the idea later. Garry Peterson describes resilience thinking, in part, as being a deliberatively subjective look at systems. Instead of trying to map it out objectively, you're trying to look at what you can see from the different perspectives in order to get a fuller picture, even in disagreement.

And a little more...

Chris Jones muses about the definition, history, and implications of considering paradigms - the way we describe and understand things. As a side note, Paradigm 101 isn't part of a blog, but part of a wiki set up for Chris's consulting company. I hadn't seen this tack taken in an individual's online publishing before and find it interesting

Why Systems Surprise Us

Beth Robinson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:20:42 +0000

We model reality. No matter how well we think we understand a thing or a system that understanding is based on a mental construct, a model.

Systems surprise us where the model and reality don't match.

At the Edges of Importance

Any analysis of a problem or system diagram has a boundary, a place where you decide that those other thngs out there that could be included aren't sufficiently important.

Doing this at some point is necessary and it's often helpful to bring them in closer than you could, such as when you describe walking as moving your legs instead of including all the electrochemical signals and tensing/relaxing of muscles. Yet it is on that level of complexity that you ignored that something happening in the rest of your body, like a heart attack, could affect the process you're trying to describe.

It's a great art to remember that the boundaries are of our own making, and they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. -Donella Meadows

When the Unknown is Invisible

Most people make rational decisions based on the partial information that they have, no matter how self-defeating those choices seem to those of us outside. In simulation after simulation, when someone is placed into that same situation with limited informaton, they make the same choices as others did before them, not able to take into account the information that they can't see.

If We Expect Simple Addition

Our brains tend to build models from series of events and expect that when you put in more, you get more. We make nice neat lines in our minds.

But in natural systems the true behavior is usually described by a collection of patterns over time and you reach a point where adding more to something does nothing, and then actually causes problems.

Surprises are Inevitable

Thinking about systems can be uncomfortable because we are acknowledging that we can never bring ourselves to perfect understanding. We can make surprises take familiar forms, but not avoid them completely.

The full descriptions by Donella Meadows go into greater detail of what to look for and add a few more common ways that we find our mental models don't mesh with reality, allowing systems to surprise us. This post is the sixth in a series that discusses the concepts in her book Thinking in Systems. Also read my other posts:

Book Review: Thinking in Systems
What is a System?
Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
Why Systems Surprise Us
The Same Story Retold
at least two more to come....

Is Strategic Management Enough?

Beth Robinson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:05:45 +0000

A few months ago I was reading discussions about how if financial leaders had been approaching their problems from a systems thinking perspective then they might have done things differently so as to lessen or completely avoid the crisis in October 2008. I've seen similar articles from time to time and managers with MBAs seemed to be a high target.

Improving judgment using systems thinking makes sense to me, so I didn't think much more of it. Until I started my Strategic Management class, the capstone class of my MBA program, and found out it was all about looking at business in different ways and taking action. There were models to evaluate the industry a business was in, the general environment around it, and its own internal strengths and weaknesses.

This type of analysis is made to look at the bigger picture, so why would it be considered not enough?

As class progressed I came up with some potential pitfalls, all of which were also influenced by business reading I'd done elsewhere and absorbed information from.

In our cases we usually only touched on one layer in our analyis. We only looked at the most immediate responses, not those that would occur because of feedback loops and delays and someone else's responses to our actions. I would imagine that the best businesses would look further when it was their livlihood at stake and not a grade, but perhaps not all of them do, for sake of time or considering it enough, so might miss things.

Also there could be the time factor. It can be difficult to carve out the time for long-term thinking, difficult enough that it's one of the exhortations in various time management and productivity theories, implying that most people don't.

Overall, our focus was on the profitability of the business. It was the only lens we looked through. We would include things like customer response or social good in certain cases, but it was related to branding and positioning and rarely about intrinsic goals. This would seem to be something that would be an even greater driver in the real world.

We also only looked at it from our point of view, even though we considered multiple factors. Other voices weren't considered, nor was there any discussion about collaborating with them, just responding to them.

I can see how things such as these might have a dramatic effect, yet I'm unsure.

I also wondered if in-person MBA programs had more discussion or different types of assignments that would have led me to different thoughts. I find it unlikely, otherwise there would not be those educators deliberately trying to infuse systems thinking or integrative thinking or sustainability into the curriculum. My experience was likely typical.

To be effective, this post really should have held more references to what others have written or I should have been able to tie together the different modes of thought in a more sophisticated way. I haven't mastered the principles well enough to do the kind of thinking I wanted, hence this informal style, but I still wanted to pose the question.

During the course of my MBA I learned a great deal about the different aspects of the business and on what basis decisions are likely to be made, whether for good or bad. I found a different perspective on what was and is happening within the company I work for and on the more popular business books that I have read. The commitment to the degree also influenced the extra-curricular learning I did online and otherwise. I am glad I took the time and effort and am also glad I'm done, so I have more control over my time again. Of course, I'll be using it to do other learning and experience gaining things....

Someday I hope to return to this concept again, about how we are taught to think in different formal and informal ways and the effects of that, but, in the meantime, what musings would you like to add?

Quick Update - Unplanned Hiatus

Beth Robinson — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:25:10 +0000

I've been a bit distracted the last few weeks and it will continue for the next couple. I don't normally subscribe to the theory of apologizing for not posting, but wanted to let you know that I'm still here. I will be continuing. I just need to finish this time-consuming final class of my MBA first.

Effective Systems Beyond Our Control

Beth Robinson — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:43:50 +0000

Most natural systems recover well when buffeted by winds of change, even when they come fast and from many directions. But then when we try to control the results in the short term or define a too narrow range of performance, we can defeat the very mechanisms that allow them to behave so well.

Resilience brings the system back to center.

Oscillations, or conditions swinging back and forth around a central point, are often normal, both in the short-term and the long term. A healthy system has a collection of balancing loops that operate in different ways across these different lengths of time that bring the behavior back to that central point.

If we look at the system in too short a time frame or if the swings in behavior are too extreme for our expectations, then it sure doesn't feel like it is behaving well! Then we might try to keep the recoveries from occurring, but without resilience the system would really take off in a direction we had not protected.

Self-organization allows a system to become more complex on its own.

Snowflakes grow and communities come together by following a few simple rules and relationships. But these simple rules make possible a larger, more complex system that can meet a challenge or just a slightly changed situation.

However, this can be disconcerting to us, because there's no way to tell from the initial state and the rules (which we don't always know) exactly what the end result is going to be. This is how we come up with snowflakes that all look different. If we try to say that only certain snowflakes are an acceptable shape then we keep the system from being able to reach its full potential.

A hierarchy of subsystems keeps effort from being repeated.

Most systems are layers of systems within systems, like cells in organs in our bodies. Because different functions can be assigned to different systems, like the lungs or the liver, then the overall system functions more effectively. In addition, two subsystems in different areas often don't affect each other directly.

Hierarchy is also why the more usual practice of studying things by breaking them down into their parts works. We just can't forget that the parts interact when they are in together.

This post is the fifth in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. It summarized chapter 3 which is titled rather more optimistically "Why Systems Work So Well." I found the comments about short-sightedness that she embedded into her stories to be as important as the three characteristics themselves and tried to include a sense of them here. Also read my other posts:

Book Review: Thinking in Systems
What is a System?
Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
Why Systems Surprise Us
The Same Story Retold
at least two more to come....

Delays and Disasters at the Zoo

Beth Robinson — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:57:00 +0000

"A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo" is the appealing title of chapter 2 in Thinking in Systems, and is intended to show that Donella Meadows will be isolating and looking at small interactions by themselves instead of in their larger ecosystems.

What follows is merely a summary, with one key point taken from each detailed example. The book goes through them step by step including visualizations of the system itself and its performance over time.

There will always be delays in response.

A thermostat is a stock with two competing balancing loops, the flow of heat from the furnace and the flow of heat to the outside. You can only make changes that affect future behavior, never current, and when you need to remember to make one change go fast enough to correct for the actions of the other.

One process can have a stronger effect than the other.

Population growth and decline is a stock with one reinforcing loop - fertility - and one balancing loop - mortality. Depending on the circumstances, one loop will be dominant and have a greater effect. This is also often true in more complex systems. Just because interactions are present does not mean that each cycle is equally important.

Lengthening or shortening delays can have a profound effect.

The changes in business inventory is a system with multiple delays.

Delay in perception - how long it takes to decide that an increase in sales means an order needs to be made.

Delay in response - how much of the shortfall you try to order at one time.

Delay in delivery - how long it takes to receive the product.

This creates an oscillation when the the inventory flip-flops between being overstocked and understocked. The human reaction to this annoyance is usually to react more quickly.

Acting faster actually makes the situation worse!

But lengthening the time it takes to decide to order and increasing how much you order at once allows you to have a more stable inventory level.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one...

It's because she is struggling to operate in a system in which she doesn't have, and can't have, timely information and in which physical delays prevent her actions from having an immediate affect on inventory. She doesn't know what her customers will do next. When they do something, she's not sure they'll keep on doing it. When she issues an order, she doesn't see an immediate response. This situation of information insufficiency and physical delays is very common. (emphasis mine)

The higher and faster you grow, the farther and faster you fall.

At least in a system like the oil economy, which has a renewable stock constrained by a non-renewable stock. This is also a reinforcing loop and two balancing loop, but the difference is that there's a physical limit to "how much" versus "how fast".

There is only so much oil in a field, for example, the non-renewable stock, but there is potentially a limitless and renewing supply of capital money to extract that oil. At least until the oil runs out. And, as Meadows notes, the system still works this way if you factor in technological improvements that allow you to extract more oil.

Effectiveness of renewable resources depends on the system too.

In contrast, the fishing economy is a renewable stock constrained by a renewable stock. Again, capital money is one stock, and the size of the resource, in this case the amount of fish is the other. There is also still a reinforcing loop and two balancing loops.

The system will almost always overshoot, followed by one of three results:

a sustainable equilibrium - we can still eat fish, just maybe not as many at once
oscillations around that equilibrium - prices and supply bounce around and we might go to
a collapse of the resource - no more fish

Just because the resource is renewable, doesn't mean we're safe. We have to avoid taking the level to the point below where it is capable of regenerating. And we have to have a balancing loop that is strong enough to slow capital growth as the resource decreases.

This post is the fourth in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Read the book to see her diagrams, graphs, and capture more of the subtleties of the concepts, especially when it comes to this chapter. I think I still need to reread it a few more times to get everything I can from it. Also reach my other posts:

Book Review: Thinking in Systems
What is a System?
Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
Why Systems Surprise Us
The Same Story Retold
at least two more to come....

Bits and Pieces - April 2009

Beth Robinson — Sun, 03 May 2009 01:54:05 +0000

Terminology Tempest

At Lateral Action, Mark McGuinness points out an interesting dichotomy as one part of a larger article. Psychologists and business researchers agree completely that ideas and action must be combined. But one calls the combination innovation and the ideas by themselves creativity and the other completely switches the terms. Imagine the furor that would happen if you had these two groups in a room discussing innovation and creativity without them knowing that ahead of time! If you seem to be going in circles in a discussion, check your definitions.

Introducing My Brand of Insanity

Tripp Babbitt of My Brand of Insanity compared "command and control" thinking to systems thinking and gave an example of how optimizing one part without considering the entire business can lead to unhappy customers. Bryce's posts frequently touch on looking at different aspects of business problems and using a systems thinking lens, as you'd expect from the principal and president of a consulting firm with the domain name of http://www.newsystemsthinking.com.

Downsides of Thinking Towards the Whole?

Angie van der Merwe is concerned that the individual can be lost when systems thinking focuses on their part in the whole and not their existence of people. It's an interesting idea to me, because I can see how the abstract nature of the process could go to far, although in this case the situation that inspired her post seems to represent a potential trap for systems thinkers and not a necessary result.

Reading Material

Brian Setzler has also been reading Thinking in Systems and riffs off it a bit while Lauren Currie recommends we read Systems Thinking in the Public Sector by John Seddon (one of Tripp's influences as well) although she describes it as a "massive challenge".

And something I just liked...

Carla Ross muses on litter, trash, environmental responsibility, and systems thinking in a slightly rambling post that

Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much

Beth Robinson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:32:00 +0000

Screechy microphone noises and comments from your manager are not what Donella Meadows has in mind when she talks about how system thinkers can see feedback everywhere.

Feedback is one part of the dynamic behavior of a system.

Reinforcing Loop

It is like an interest rate, when the increase from one month means that there's more in your bank account, or on your credit card balance, to increase the next month. So the money, or debt, grows more in the tenth month than it did in the first month.

Balancing Loop

It is like a cup of coffee on a cool day that responds to the temperature by cooling down or an iced mocha on a hot day that responds to the temperature by warming up. But the closer the temperature of the liquid is to the temperature of the air, the less it cools or warms in the next minute.

A system can cause its own behavior.

What this means to me, which is not emphasized in the book until later chapters, is that it also gives us a point where we can try to impact that behavior. We can slow down the transfer of heat by using a well-insulated cup or change the interest rate on the bank account. The problem here is that aspect of delay

Meadows highlights that it also means that when A causes B, B could be causing changes in A at the same time. In real life different loops interact and compete with each other in a complex web and the book moves next into some common relationships seen in different systems.

This post is the third in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Read the book to see her diagrams, graphs, and capture more of the subtleties of the concepts. Also reach my other posts:

Book Review: Thinking in Systems
What is a System?
Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
Why Systems Surprise Us
The Same Story Retold
at least four more to come....

Beyond the Money on Your Mind

Beth Robinson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:43:00 +0000

We all want to make money. Okay, there are a few exceptions. But, really, we all want money. Most of us want it for what it can buy us, a nice house perhaps, which also represents security.

Yet sometimes we get obsessed with counting it and as parts of a corporation we can fall even more easily into that mental mode. We can identify with "the business" and money becomes everything, justified as "shareholder value."

For some businesses that was never enough. They, or their owners, made donations to charities or attempted to improve the lives of their workforce or had a larger mission.

Transparent Behavior Matters

And now, in the age of open conversations across the internet it is easier than ever to figure out which companies act as if they care about something other than money. And which don't, even if they say they do.

And the people who buy from those companies, the market that they sell to, care about this.

This principle was one small part of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of 95 theses intended as a call to action for businesses in a connected and conversational marketplace.

#80 Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

The concept sounds familiar, like what is being said in the media today. Except the manifesto was published in 1999. #80 was embedded in a section about having a human conversation between the people in the company and the people outside of it.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

I'm writing this post as part of a ten-year anniversary celebration thought up by Keith McArthur. He put out a call for bloggers to write about the different theses and reflect on whether they were still valid and valuable ten years later.

I actually hadn't read the manifesto before, nor the book that was written around it. In 1999 I was halfway through my thesis research for my Master's in Materials Science and all that corporate America meant to me was a a place to work when I was done in a year. I didn't care about business then.

Some of it I couldn't relate to. The company I work for doesn't really have an intranet, for example. On te other hand, some of it seemed so self-obvious to me, immersed in the evolution of thought as I've been by learning business on the blogosphere, that I had to mentally reach to understand how saying it must have been new then.

Thinking Beyond the Money Even More Valid

But this point spoke to me, partly because I've been reading The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge and company, which is subtitled "how individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world." The buzzword today is green and thinking about the well-being of the planet as well as the balance sheet is one of those other things that many consumers want to see on a business's mind.

Another aspect of thinking beyond making money is to include the potential delayed and unintended effects of focusing on that money, like the employee who spends long hours at the office and never sees his or her kids as they grown, instead of choosing a somewhat lower paying job with less hours. What are the trade-offs and what will your kids, or your customers think of you? Are there ways you can change this in your current framework, or do you need to change the framework?

The point of the manifesto isn't so much that these things are completely new. Employees and customers have always had voices. The point is that the internet makes them louder, more powerful, and the complexity of the network creates new strengths that businesses must pay attention to in order to survive.

Changes over Decades

In the last ten years the network has only become more complex, spurring the sites and resources we now call social media, for example, and the ball rolling down hill, the drive towards conversation, has only picked up steam. We all, businesses and individuals, continue to respond.

Perhaps in ten more years someone in school now won't understand what all the fuss was about, because the result will make the manifesto self-evident.

Or perhaps new behavior will emerge and turn all that we have expected upside down. We'll see.

For more responses to the Cluetrain Manifest visit the list of bloggers on the Cluetrain Plus 10 wiki.