Gems from the deep "kiss systemic analysis"

Some simple and straightforward questions that can help to diagnose deeper systemic problems

When it is difficult to find the root causes of issues ask these questions 

• Has the issue occurred in the past, how long ago, under what circumstances?
• What sort of issues are surfacing in your coworkers teams? 
• Have these issues occurred in the past either in your team or other teams? 
• How different are the teams where these issues occur/have occurred?

Use "surfacing" techniques to corroborate the analysis throughout the organisation, this involves asking the same questions to a selection of people at different levels, with different lengths of tenure. 

Quite often colleagues experience the same or similar issues throughout the organisation, when they do these issues are often just symptoms of deeper underlying systemic problems that are ingrained in the organisation's culture or enforced by its processes. 



Some organisations are limited by too much focus on operations, they tend to be governed by the system archetypes "fixes that fail" or "shifting the burden". 

Rather than take a longer-term more strategic approach they prefer quick fixes or waiting for the future or getting rid of the problem with outsourcing. These approaches are doomed to fail, find out why in Sea of Systems.

I explore these and other systemic techniques in my eBook Sea of Systems, download it at my blog https://systemsthinkingit.blogspot.com.au




About — "gems from the deep" takes a quick dive into the more detailed and involved concepts explored in the eBooks Sea of Systems and Transparent Delivery (forthcoming).

Gems from the deep "making sustainability work"

Learn to present a clearer and more certain picture of the future than sticking your wet thumb in the air

It can't last forever

No matter how good the service is and no matter how well the service appears to be meeting demand, sooner or later the laws of system dynamics will come into play and causal loop feedback will catch up with us. Quite simply put: 'it can't last forever'.

In the above services system model acceptable service quality is limited by capacity, ultimately having an adverse effect on provisioning the service, for instance, not being able to meet the agreed service level. This is typical of the system archetype limits-to-growth.

How to address it?

• Use system dynamics to map-out and model service provisioning

• Try to understand and map-out all the systemic influences involved

• Consider the dimension of time and see what influence it has on the model(s)

• Consider the voice of the customer and involve customers with the model(s)

• Statistics don't lie, obtain as much statistical data as possible

• Identify trends and patterns of behaviour

• Walk-through and live-out the various scenarios learned from the models 

• Pick one that works

Conclusion

You've heard the saying "there's no silver bullet"?  Well, try to get as close as you can, maybe there's no guarantee and maybe it's hard to imagine all the "unforeseeable" circumstances, but when you start to use models in this way you can certainly present a clearer and more certain picture of the future than sticking your wet thumb in the air. 

When I started looking at the world through models the penny dropped, the overwhelming feeling was "IT people must know about this". That was in 1994 and I've been banging on about it ever since.

The system archetypes are in control and it is very hard to do anything about it, but if we don't try, what does that make us? I talk about this in the conclusion of Sea of Systems "well at least I helped this one".

I explore this and other system archetypes in my eBook Sea of Systems, download it at my blog https://systemsthinkingit.blogspot.com.au

Fixes that fail: decommissioning

What starts out as a successful quick-win turns into a low-leverage intervention that causes more trouble than its original root cause.  With the advent of IaaS and SaaS the example used in "fixes that fail" seems a little dated, truth being I haven't had time to update it, however the central principles are still valid and very much applicable in our organisations (first published in 2009). 

Fixes that fail: Decommissioning from Systems Thinking IT



When I started looking at the world through models the penny dropped, the overwhelming feeling was "IT people must know about this". That was in 1994 and I've been banging on about it ever since.

The system archetypes are in control and it is very hard to do anything about it, but if we don't try, what does that make us? I talk about this in the conclusion of Sea of Systems "well at least I helped this one".

I explore this and other system archetypes in my eBook Sea of Systems, download it at my blog https://systemsthinkingit.blogspot.com.au

Sea of Systems

The 2017 edition of Sea of Systems builds on the 2011 edition with enhanced and expanded explanations of Deming cycle, reflection, system archetypes, systemic mapping and systems thinking.





Sea of Systems by James Wood is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.  Based on a work at http://www.solonline.org.
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