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).
