Category: framework

One of the concepts I like most from my study of Systems Thinking in Practice is the idea of reification. This is the idea of making a concept into something more concrete, to give it a name as it were.

This is dangerous.
From a systems thinking perspective.
Because it makes it seem like it’s the only answer, when there are a multitude of ways to overcome a challenge or to navigate a messy situation.
Reifying something makes it a crutch, which is a meta-reification if ever there was one!

My latest module is all about strategy and how the systems thinking heuristic can enable strategies that work for complex situations in uncertain times.
Bang on for me, I’d suggest.
Bang on for the current situation.

I’ve been considering strategic approaches to solving specific situations recently.
Both are for work purposes, although one has more personal connections.
With the latter, I’ve had to project the possibility that there is no one, single path that I can define.
In fact, in my presentation this week I talked about systems and relationships, the explicit and implicit and how my strategy for the messy situation is only to pay attention to those at all times.
That the answer will flit and dance and drift in and out of focus.
It won’t be graspable at any time.

That’s a hard position to take.
Except that is doesn’t change the strategic destination, the goal or aim.
It just means that how we get there will be ever-changing.
That we may seemingly meander.
Perhaps loop back on ourselves.
(Which made me consider, for a fleeting moment, what the commercial equivalent of an ox-bow lake might be.)
But ultimately, we will have chosen the correct path because it gave us the efficient flow when we needed it, slowed us down when we had to make hard choices about where next, and even offered us a view of a previous state from a new position (which is, I suppose, a form of hindsight).

But doing this allowed me to show how the strategy would work in a simple way.
Elegant even.
A one-page diagram with four interconnected parts to it.
That made the complexity of the road ahead manageable for others.
Not simple, or even simplistic.
Understandable.
So that anyone on that call, from the finance person to the HR person to the commercial director, could see how it related to them personally, on a work level and as an organisation.
Which is what I would argue strategy should do.
Good strategy.

Beyond that, the thing that I’m learning from my STiP study is that I’m able to demonstrate my thought process in a single diagram, or a rich picture (as described by Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology).
Which can be shared with little or no additional context and be understood.

Because these tools don’t reify.
They just present things as they are and invite others to add their own ideas and thoughts to the picture, to make it richer.

Allowing you to see things in a different way.
Like a reverse of Scriberia‘s images I so often associate with Neil Perkin’s Firestarters series.

If I were writing briefs, I’d include more of these types of heuristics.
They would be so useful to creative teams.
To multi-disciplinary teams.
To clients, too.