Tag: systems thinking

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The Feeling of Stupidity and the Rewards that Gives

The past 12 months I’ve been studying for an MSc in a subject that is far and above what I would consider my intelligence able to handle.

I’m not being self-deprecating here. I know I’m not stupid. It’s just that taking on a STEM subject when you’ve spent the past 20 or so years doing arts stuff, well, it makes for a steep learning curve. Or rather, a deep learning trough.

I routinely find myself re-reading something six or seven times and still not grasping it. Never a good sign. Partly this is because Systems Thinking isn’t an easy subject. More so at Masters level.

Part of the issue sits with distance learning. It’s hard to foster conversations that help with cognition when those people you’re on the course with live overseas, or just don’t want to get involved with an online forum. Especially an online forum that doesn’t thread conversations.

Another challenge is that the subject can be applied to any complex situation, so subjects range from European Economic legislature to local government to healthcare to social systems for drug addicts to education. I know less about most of that than I do Systems Thinking.

Oh, did I mention that the course is also about the application of the tools I’m gaining knowledge of? Many people enrolled on the course are using their everyday job as a way of doing the practical side. I don’t have a job. I have few clients that want to pay me to test out some theories and methodologies I have a scant understanding of.

When I say few, I mean none.

What this means is, I often feel stupid. Really stupid.

Why can’t I grasp this concept?

What is it about this tool that I could use to show I understand it?

Why is academia both arcane in its approach to writing and incredibly rigid on its word count?

And then I remember that, in a conversation with a client, I was able to untangle a Gordian Knot of organisational messiness that had flummoxed the internal team and at least one other consultant for almost a year. Just by asking a question. A single question that I wouldn’t have thought to ask had I not learned about requisite variety.

I remember that I’m not stupid every time I draw a diagram to understand what’s going on with a situation and where – and with whom – the power lies within it.

It’s the best feeling when someone better understands what they need to do after you’ve unpicked a messy issue for them or drawn it out for them. How they go off and make actual change happen based on something you’ve taught them.

These things don’t happen often. In fact, they’ve all happened once only with clients. The diagrams occur more frequently, I tend not to share them – they’re a tool in themselves that help me understand where I might be able to start, or what questions I might want to ask. They show up biases, misunderstandings, political issues, and where organisations and/or people get in their own way.

Feeling stupid is an important part of learning. Without it, I’d simply be confirming my own bias. It forces me to reflect. To think about why I’m thinking. To step beyond the facts and consider the knowledge and history underpinning decisions. To take in multiple views and work with the contradictions that develop from this, as well as the uncertainty this creates.

Being stupid makes me question things: myself, what I’m being asked, why people think a certain thing or do things a certain way.

I’m learning to embrace my stupidity, to make it work in my favour. To make me smarter, so I can start to push towards more difficult concepts. Or to discover why the application of what appears to be obvious isn’t always the right thing to do.

I’m thankful for the patience of those who understand that learning is about feeling stupid occasionally. That learning requires admission of that stupidity and for others not to react with snarky comments or a sense of superiority. To ask questions of why and how. Hard as it is, without stupidity, I’d have failed my first year.

I just hope I’ve got a tiny bit smarter in preparation for the year ahead.

No one should be allowed to stay stupid. Or worse, want to remain so. That’s not something you’d vote for.

Oh.

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Common Sense

There has been a lot of talk about common sense these past few weeks.
People trot it out as if it means the same to everyone.
Yet, it doesn’t.
What is common to me is based on my ‘tradition of understanding’ (my upbringing and environment in which I grew up) and my worldview (read: my biases), which may well be very different to yours.
Or our ‘common sense’ may align.

The original meaning of the term appears to come from the 14th Century as a sense that unites us in a common bond.
Very different to today’s meaning, which is the wisdom that we all possess.
That makes an assumption that we all think and behave alike.
We don’t.
And the more complex a situation, the more difficult it is to determine what common sense means.

I was reminded of common sense and how it can lead to making situations worse when I was watching this video about systems thinking within the NHS.

SystemsThinking – A New Direction in Healthcare Incident Investigation

Turns out, sense isn’t so common after all.
Not because people are stupid, although there are examples where that might root cause analysis may decide that’s the case.
No, it’s because most of us only see what is in front of us.
We do not consider the interrelated aspects of our world, our lives, our societies.
We can become self-centred, or we just want the problem to go away.
Or we have to meet a target and therefore what seems to be the easiest decision is taken.

All of these things could be considered common sense.
None of them would fix the challenges we face right now.

We need some uncommon sense.
Or better yet, we need to think systemically.

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The Reification of Strategic Practice

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.

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A Question of Ethics

I was on the #Cardstock Zoom call today.
Matt Ballantine mentioned the difficultly in determining ethics within an organisation.
I said I could help.
Because ethics is something that comes up more than once within systems thinking.

The biggest problem with ethics is that people assume you mean morals.
While they share the same house, they are definitely in different rooms.
Morals are personal, whereas ethics are defined by the group.
And therein lies the problem.
It’s a group activity.

Ethics can’t be rushed, either.
They should not be provided as a static way of being.
Instead, ethics should be malleable, almost as if they were a start-up within an organisation.
This allows for new worldviews to be brought to the table for discussion.
We’ve seen how this might play out with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the dilemmas that doctors are finding themselves in with regards to who gets treatment and who doesn’t.
It’s not as cut and dried as it might seem.

Morally, it should be everyone.
Ethically, the choice is not binary.
This is why hospitals have ethics committees, so that one person’s morals don’t override what is best for all parties involved.
It also means difficult decisions need to be made.
But it also means that as new data are made, so that committee can shift their ethical policy.

Heinz von Foerster (1992; Ethics and second-order cybernetics. Cybern Hum Knowing 1:9–19) states that ethics are “desirable and undesirable conditions inherent in any action and in the consequences of the action.”
The conditions of our ethics are not abstract, but are a core part of a form of action. This is clear in the example above about our current medical situation.

So, how do you go about creating ethics?
Discussion.
Reflection.
Knowing, and accepting, each other’s worldviews (which will include morals).
And a big bucket of compromise.

Because ethics are emergent.
They are not static and solid.
Despite what we think.

Those practices that we can agree upon, as a group, are what make up our ethics.
As Ray Ison points out in his excellent book, How to Act (Ison, 2010, pages 108-109), it is the working on the code of ethics (or conduct) that is important, not the code itself.

If that all sounds like it’s obscuring the obvious, it’s not meant to. What it means is: we need to have the difficult conversations in order to determine where we are willing to draw our boundaries.
That’s where the ethics are.

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Constraints

Today has been a hard day.
I’ve been writing my end of module assignment.
It’s not so much the subject matter that is causing a problem, it’s a constraint imposed upon me: a word count.

Constraints exist everywhere, some are imposed by others, some by ourselves.
Some are implicit and others explicit.

This one is causing me some mental frustration.
How to condense 6 month’s of learning across 52 concepts into 2,200 words, including a conclusion.
There is a lot of redrafting happening.

And that’s what we do with any constraint.
We push to the limit and then change things to better fit what we have.
Whether that’s rewriting an assignment, redecorating our homes and rearranging the furniture, how we work with others, or how we arrive at a decision.

Constraints are a necessary evil.
I could write 10,000 words on systems thinking concepts, but it would likely be mostly waffle.
The constraint is there is make me behave reflexively and to select my words carefully.

When I worked in advertising, constraints were provided by planners and strategists. They still are. Some people believe it’s the pithy statement that we call the ‘reason to believe’ or the ‘unique selling point’ or ‘positioning statement’ that serves as a creative stepping stone; others say it’s the actual brief itself.
And it’s all those things.
Constraints that make you love and hate them simultaneously!

But, I think, it’s also the process that someone goes through to arrive at this destination.
It’s the framing and reframing, the taking out and putting in and taking out again.
The decisions made.
Perhaps that’s the art of the constraint?
Or in a systems thinking world it’s what we do when we do what we do, as strategists.

Yes, that will do.

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Looking back to move forward

As I come to end of my module on my MSc, so I have to write an end of module assignment. This means going back over everything I’ve learned and looking at it with fresh eyes – and a brain that should, hopefully, have evolved its thinking around systems and systems practice.

One of the things I do is blog on the OU platform. It’s open to students, but not to the outside world. For today’s post, I want to pull out something that isn’t about systems but is about systems. That’s the thing about learning, new connections open up.

I posted about the Why Is This Interesting newsletter published on 15 January 20201 on the forum, but I wanted to pick apart the idea of Japanese craftspeople and the three principles that they adhere to in their lives and work. 

And I want to add to it, the Japanese concept of Kintsugi. Both, I think, are relevant to Systemic Inquiry and Systems Thinking in general.

Shokunin
The three principles of Shokunin, as outlined in the newsletter are:

  1. We do not work alone. In the newsletter, the author refers to the systems that our work depends upon, which I took to mean those that we are drawing a boundary around, as well as those that that exist outside in the environment the system we are concerned with sits.
  2. Passing on our knowledge. One of the things I’ve found through my study is that people are intrigued by what it is and how it can be applied. The ‘in Practice’ part of STiP is really important. There is an element with the practice of passing on knowledge, which is created together as well as the traditions of understanding that we bring to the situation.
  3. I only know plenty. This is described in the newsletter as a “Zen saying that can be thought of as a kind of mantra. Ware Tada Taru wo Shiru (吾 唯 足 知) translates literally as ‘I only know plenty’. But non-literally it means “what one has is all one needs”: I am content with what I have because that is all I need.”

    I took this in the manner in which it’s stated, as well as thinking about how what I have to work with when I’m undertaking an inquiry is all I need, because ethics, information and knowledge and so forth will come forth from the inquiry itself. Everything is there, we just need to see it.

    I also consider the 14 practices that Donella Meadows outlined in her concept of dancing with systems (Ramage and Shipp, 2009)2 here. Also available here.

Kintsugi3
This is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer (Wikipedia), although I am mostly considering the philosophy that breakage and repair are part of an object’s history, rather than something that needs to be hidden or disguised.

In terms of Systems, I feel that this is very pertinent as it is not about fixing but about seeing where things can be improved or designed; in a sense, I see Kintsugi as a design turn – this is a systems term for changing course when you learn something that requires you to do so. Think pivot. This is something I am going to reflect upon more and consider it as part of my ongoing inquiry and systemic practice. 

1 Chicco, G (2020) Why Is This Interesting? – The Shokunin Edition. Available here: https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/why-is-this-interesting-the-shokunin Last accessed: 15 January 2020

2 Ramage, M, Shipp, K (2009) Systems Thinkers Springer, London, Open University, Milton Keynes 

3 Wikipedia (2019), Kintsugi. Available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi Last accessed: 15 January 2020