A new view of your organization

Sketch out your current state for insights

There’s something in us that loves a puzzle. We feel satisfied and moved when we can see the whole picture. Our sense of beauty often arises from seeing something or someone in their entirety.

But when it comes to where we work, we rarely feel beauty. We focus on the tasks in front of us, the dynamics with people we regularly engage with, and if we’re lucky, how we can accomplish our part of a compelling vision. But we almost always lack a view of the whole because, well, it’s really big and complicated.

If you think about the daily activity in an organization, you’ll notice that much is isolated or “snapshot” thinking. Why does this happen, given the obvious need to understand, manage, and evolve the whole system?

The short answer is complexity. The complexity can undermine our confidence and sense of responsibility. Phrases like “It’s all too complex for me” or “There’s nothing I can do” belie our sense of helplessness. Throw in rapid change and uncertainty, and we’re really uncomfortable.

The tools of systems thinking¹ help us view that whole: interrelationships, patterns of change, dynamics that are not immediately front-of-mind. Think of watching all the animals and plants in a forest. As you watch how they move, act, and interact, you learn about how the unique ecosystem works.

Now imagine trying to learn from a single photo of the forest. What do you focus on then? What information is missing?

When we can’t see the whole, us messy humans may be facing different directions. Work can feel like a maze, and even our best-intended actions may fall flat or go awry. As a coach who spends a lot of time observing how people behave at work, I have seen a lot of really wonderful folks flounder because they’re not sure how to be effective.

Not all leaders are able to see the whole either, partly because of siloed organizational structure. The cost of this can be significant for an organization — this is why we hear a lot of corporate speak about “alignment.” Various strategic systems are designed to help with this, like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), KPIs, “nudge units,” SMART goals, etc. And agilists skilled at working at scale use a variety of techniques to create a “steel thread” of meaning that ensures information about desired outcomes is communicated and refined through the whole work breakdown process.

With deep attention to details, these approaches can be useful. But they generally leave out a discussion of holistic dynamics. This means that all those efforts to organize and control are vulnerable to messy human things like fear of change, cognitive overload, conflicting priorities, and lack of trust.

How do we see?

I’m a fan of drawing in groups. There’s major magic in getting people to put their inner thoughts on a wall, so everyone can see each other’s ideas, assumptions, and questions. It helps people think in new way, and most importantly it helps create a shared understanding. In my experience, this can produce deeper alignment than one of the acronyms above.

When you use any of the visual tools from the discipline of systems thinking, you tap into this magic *and* create more nuanced understanding about how to get stuff done. Systems-savvy business leaders ensure employees understand how the organization works and encourage them to help improve processes to meet overall corporate goals.

Here’s an example. I was asked to reduce conflict between two senior leaders because their teams were in conflict, pointing fingers about why work wasn’t getting done on time. This meant the VPs were in conflict too. Overall, it felt like a culture-wide habit of conflict.

I knew it wasn’t going to work just ask them to be nice.  So I brought in a partially completed causal loop diagram for them to finish. I started with the team-level emotional  feedback loop on the right, and they added in their behaviors, their team lead behaviors, dynamics around defect rates, SAFe rituals, and more.

A causal loop diagram analyzing the dynamics within two collaborating organizations at a Fortune 100 company.

Within 45 minutes, the VPs had stopped being irritated with each other and shifted into a collaborative exploration about where to intervene. The yellow stars are the five experiments they chose, including adjusting their own leadership approach. It was a wonderful win.

The first step

So where do you start? I vote you start small. Learn the basics of causal loop diagramming (it’s relatively easy, just go slowly at first). Pick a system nested within the larger system, grab a group of people, and spend 45 minutes at a whiteboard drawing out the dynamics of a problem you want to explore. I bet something will surprise you, and maybe even inspire you to action.

1. Systems thinking has been around since the 1950s. It’s an analytical approach that focuses on how the different parts of a system interrelate and how systems work within the context of other, larger systems. It is a holistic that can be used in many areas of research and analysis of a variety of operational systems. Some of the popular graphics used in the analysis include the causal loop diagram, the behavior over time graph, the management flight simulator, and the simulation model.