Yet all too often, we find ourselves working in systems stuck in downward spirals of self-defeating dynamics. Intuitively, we all know the story of the downward spiral. A sports team makes a few mistakes and then cannot manage even the most basic play. A company cuts maintenance budgets due to financial pressure, which results in more breakdowns and lower quality, rising costs and lost customers, and eventually even greater financial pressure.

The downward spiral is a metaphor for decline, a self-reinforcing process that depletes something of value (or, in systems thinking terms, a “stock”). It can be described as a cycle of disinvestment or deterioration, as players withdraw resources from a system, an action that reduces its performance and prompts further withdrawals down the line. Unfortunately, when we are part of a downward spiral, we almost always find it difficult to see a way out because the incentives in the situation often reward narrow, short-term thinking.

Mobilizing change in a downward spiral means starting without the usual conditions for success. Because of the financial and emotional stress of the situation, we are unlikely to have accurate data, sufficient resources or time, committed participation from other stakeholders, or executive sponsorship. We lack the inclination to collaborate with others because our trust has eroded. And, frankly, why should we invest more effort before “they” fix their part of the problem?

For example, a colleague told me about a company where two department leaders who reported to the same boss were competing to avoid the boss’s disapproval. As a result, the leaders distanced themselves from each other. They were cordial in group settings, but otherwise they hardly spoke. They would only return each other’s emails or phone calls when absolutely necessary. This dynamic left the staff in the leaders’ departments unclear how to manage interactions, as their policies conflicted with each other. As a result, the company paid more contract penalties, and service quality suffered. Of course, overall results worsened, and staff confusion increased. But when my colleague asked the two leaders about addressing the issue, they said they wanted to send their teams to a workshop on collaboration.

Systems thinkers believe that if people have a shared picture of how a system works, they can shift things for the better. Our “meta-model” for change is that systems thinking will lead to shared vision, common mental models, and coordinated action on the leverage points that will turn the situation around. Unfortunately, in a downward spiral, where we most need systemic change, we typically cannot negotiate the time or attention to fully understand key dynamics and coordinate action. What we need instead is a meta-model that lets us “bootstrap” our way out of the downward spiral.

“Bootstrapping” is short for “pulling up by one’s bootstraps” or self-generated change. For example, we refer to a computer as “booting up” because it is hardwired to execute a small amount of code that instructs it to execute the next batch of code and so on, repeating until the computer is ready for use. In similar ways in other systems, the dynamics of organic growth — including feedback, accumulation, and amplification — can over time turn small changes into the miraculous forms of a baby, a town, a business, an economy, or a complex ecosystem.

Rediscovering Organic Growth

Given the choice, most leaders want to grow something real. Much as they welcome change, they lose all motivation when asked to “go through the motions” of improvement. “I just can’t do fake stuff,” said a senior vice president. Though they may compromise to reach short-term targets, most would prefer to focus on long-term, ongoing results and real value.

Of course, we do not “grow” results directly. The only way to improve long-term financial results and other outcomes is to grow the systems and capabilities that generate them. This is why nearly every systemic change is ultimately about fostering organic growth.

Whereas inorganic growth occurs through accretion — as when a business grows through mergers – to grow organically means to increase (or restore) through natural development, measured in size, complexity, or maturity. Any system that is growing organically is functioning well enough to create a surplus that can be reinvested in new capabilities or provide resources to the larger system. One of the most inspiring aspects of these turbulent times is that there are signs that those who really know how to grow or regenerate an organization can differentiate themselves for the future. Witness the performance of what Jim Collins and Morten Hansen refer to as “10x companies” in a recent study (Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, HarperCollins, 2011).

Yet for most leaders, the dynamics of organic growth are invisible day to day. They cannot see whether their core capabilities are growing, deteriorating, or getting close to a tipping point. Managers see financial results and other outcome metrics, but the system that generates those results is a black box, and everyone in the organization has to discover for themselves how it works. Ironically, this sometimes leads busy leaders to think more simplistically, just when they need to be thinking more systemically.

Still, in most cases, asking leaders to learn the language of systems thinking so they can discuss growth is too high a hurdle. They need a simpler lens to prompt them to ask the right questions and make good decisions. Is there a way to help leaders see and manage the dynamics of organic growth more intuitively — without requiring them to learn a new language before they can start?

The Upward Spiral

In almost every culture, the shape associated with growth is the spiral (as shown by Angeles Arrien in Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes and How to Use Them, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998). Many things in nature grow in spirals, from ferns to seashells to whirlpools. They can be as small as the double helix of a protein molecule and as large as the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Over 80 percent of plant life exhibits spiral growth patterns (see SpiralZoom).

The spiral is simply the shape created by a self-reinforcing growth process. By definition, a spiral winds around a center, in a progressive expansion or contraction, a rise or fall. What we see is the accumulation of changes as the system iterates over time. We tend to associate an upward spiral with growth, development, and evolution, as reflected in the architecture of spires and towers. Thus, I have begun using the metaphor of the upward spiral as a meta-model for systemic change. I define the upward spiral in this context as a metaphor for growth or “mutually reinforcing change that creates or regenerates something we value.”

To understand why the upward spiral metaphor simplifies and empowers how we think about systemic change, let’s take a look at two other prototypical models, Heroic Change and Grassroots Change.

With Heroic Change, change is likened to a journey or “trip to the moon.” In practice, it generally involves a strategic injection of resources and energy to orchestrate a “trip” from the old way to the new way. The drawback is that it is resource intensive, so we may find we do not have enough fuel to get to our destination. If we have not reached our goal and have bulldozed past opposition, the system may swing back toward the other pole, stuck in oscillation rather than advancing (see The Structure of Things by Robert Fritz).

By contrast, with Grassroots Change, we think of change occurring through “ripple effects.” It relies on many small-scale efforts, gradually winning converts until the new way replaces the old. This approach allows for creative emergence, yet can fail to take off if it does not engage structural barriers that limit progress or if local efforts do not build on each other. If our experiments run out of energy, or if we have excluded important opposition, the system can swing back again toward the other pole.

As an alternative, the upward spiral metaphor prompts us to engage limits and opposition, but at a manageable angle. It is not straight up, nor is it entirely sideways. Like a spiral staircase, it grows an asset stepwise, in increments that fit with our resources at any given time. This does not mean we lower our sights; it simply means we only go as fast as we can go and keep it real. The upward spiral approach enables us to bootstrap change out of many small efforts, but it challenges us to go beyond “preaching to the choir.” In practice, many intractable situations in business, cross-sector collaborations, personal relationships, and public life are improved through small, reciprocal actions among peers, leaders and followers, and opposing parties. The upward spiral metaphor looks for ways to use this dynamic intentionally, consciously activating higher levels of aspiration, commitment, and action — even among those who disagree.

The upward spiral metaphor prompts us to engage limits and opposition, but at a manageable angle.

For example, in a tense union-management conversation leading up to a negotiation, a mediator recognized that trust was so low that the parties involved even misinterpreted sincere collaborative behavior. Rather than continue, with the risk of a destructive strike looming, he advised both parties to stop the negotiating activity. He then asked each side to draft a list of things the other could do to demonstrate that it had turned over a new leaf and was committed to collaborating. Management’s list included “reduce work-to-rule days during critical busy periods.” Labor listed items such as “do not require physician’s notes for sick leave of less than a day.” Once complete, the two sides exchanged lists.

Over the following month or two, they watched each other’s actions. Eventually, someone tried an item on the other side’s list. Then the second side decided to reciprocate. The process built until the two sides had carried out a good portion of the items on the lists. When representatives met a second time to negotiate, though they still differed markedly in their interests, they were able to communicate critical data and forecasts more credibly and arrived at an innovative solution to avoid both a strike and difficulties for the workers. This same method has contributed to reversing destructive conflict in a variety of settings, such as helping end the violence in Northern Ireland.

Why the Upward Spiral Model Helps with Bootstrapping Change

In my experience, the upward spiral has four advantages as a model when thinking about systemic change.

1. It activates positive potential. In a downward spiral, we see the worst in people. Yet social psychology shows that human beings are not fixed entities. We can prime ourselves to act on higher values. The upward spiral image itself seems to evoke some of this energy. “I feel different just thinking about the situation as an upward spiral,” explained a teacher. “The image itself activates hope.” With renewed hope, we gain the imagination to reengage difficult situations with new perspective.

2. It works with the way systems grow. Because it is derived from the growth of living things, the upward spiral naturally invites systems thinking without requiring specialized terminology. We can use it to prompt questions such as: What do we want to grow? Are we currently growing or deteriorating? Are we near a tipping point? The spiral shape also guides us in pacing change, tackling challenges at a manageable “angle of approach.”

3. It views opposition as part of the process. The spiral metaphor reminds us that real progress requires engaging those with whom we disagree, so our efforts yield more than just a swing of the pendulum from one pole to the other (see “Progress Through Engaging Disagreement”). For example, as Barry Johnson describes in Polarity Management (HRD Press, 1996), by managing tensions through constructive engagement that integrates the best of two opposing view, we can create both/and solutions and an upward spiral based on shared purpose. At the same time, the metaphor recognizes that change often requires saying “no.” The Systems Archetypes, as defined in The Fifth Discipline and other resources, all involve rejecting some easy but ineffective solution — from quick fixes, to drifting goals, to monopolizing resources.

4. It enables us to take action whatever the circumstances. In systems thinking terms, the upward spiral metaphor works as a fractal; we can use it to spark our thinking relative to any critical resource, asset, or stock — zooming in and out as needed to any scale. We do not need to wait for others to collaborate; in fact, we can act unilaterally to help the right thing happen, addressing whatever is limiting our progress. For example, we can use it to think about growing a company’s strategic capabilities. And if we do not have enough support to act on those ideas, we can use it to think about building that support. If we do not have alignment with our boss on getting that support, we can use it to work on the relationship with our boss. The general principle is to use the resources for change that you do have, to create the resources that you need — starting with the most immediate barrier. For example, a marketing communications manager called her boss to discuss a problem with their marketing strategy, but he treated her concerns with some skepticism. Ah, she told herself. We can’t get to a shared mental model on our marketing strategy until we build some trust and rapport between us. I’ll focus on that. “So,” she said to her boss, “What do you see as the biggest barriers to achieving our goals this quarter?” By the end of the call, he began asking her similar questions.

The CPIRAL Model: Six Principles for Mobilizing an Upward Spiral

After studying examples of downward spirals, reversals, and upward spirals, I began discovering six principles that can help leaders take small, effective steps to build trust, collaboration, and excellence, even in difficult circumstances. To make these principles memorable, I captured them in what I call the CPIRAL Model:

• Center on the Asset
• Prime for Potential
• Invest in Increments
• Approach at the Right Angle
• Signal Through Action
• Listen and Amplify

Let’s examine each of these in the context of a real company in the throes of a downward spiral.

NTB was a client of mine that developed highly specialized software for government programs and was required to submit its software to citizen review committees for approval of the final product. Unfortunately, the company routinely delivered its programs months late. Code often had errors, and many of these were caught by clients, who rejected the faulty software. Programmers were often shifted from one project to another to catch up on deadlines. Stress led many of the programmers to work from home, which reduced the sense of teamwork. Angry customers changed specifications or added to project scope mid-stream. And if a project was delayed too long, the citizen review committee would complete its term, and the programmers would have to start over with a completely new set of approvers. As customers went to competitors, financial pressure mounted, so the company set hiring limits and raised targets for sales staff. Unfortunately, for the sales team to close deals, it often had to promise unrealistic delivery dates, which started the cycle all over again.

One day, sales promised five-month delivery on an 18-month project. The goal was so ridiculous that programming team members knew they had to try something different. They decided to hire a contract project manager (I’ll call him Jake). Jake said he would take the assignment but only with certain non-negotiable parameters. Skeptical but desperate, company leaders agreed.

If we do not diverge from the default pressures on the system, nothing will change.

To everyone’s amazement, Jake’s approach worked. The team completed 18 months of work in just five months, with no changes to the client’s specification (down from 10-25 percent on previous projects) and only 5 percent defects (down from 15 percent). Together with their clients, team members reversed a downward spiral of frustration and delays, and created an upward spiral of credible commitments, delivery, trust, and results.

How did they do it? And why did it work?

Center on the Asset

The first step in building an upward spiral is to ask, What do we want to grow? The answer is usually some kind of asset that enables us to generate the results we want. (An asset refers to any enabling resource, infrastructure, or stock – physical or intangible.) For example, Jake decided that he needed to drastically expand the team’s capability to deliver – the know how, systems, resources, and practices that enabled them to deliver high quality at a fast pace – if they were going to meet the deadline.

Prime for Potential

The second step is to activate hidden potential in ourselves and others by asking, What might help us see ourselves and each other anew? What are we truly capable of? A fresh look provides the inspiration to invest new energy in a situation with negative history. For example, Jake brought in benchmarks from his prior assignments showing how a few changes to work practices can multiply productivity. “Do you think we could apply those ideas here?” he asked the team. They wanted to try.

Invest in Increments

The third step is to decide: How big a step should we take next? The ideal next step contributes to the core asset, yet is within the scope of what you can manage. For example, Jake used the team’s willingness to try something different to get agreement on three small but radical changes. First, he insisted that all team members be assigned to the project full time (rather than several people part time). Second, he insisted the whole team travel to attend a kickoff so they got on the same page. And third, all developers and managers would review issues on joint weekly calls. Developers would fix their own bugs instead of handing them off to junior programmers to fix. These few changes ensured that 100 percent of team members only wrote code that fully met the client’s specifications, drastically reducing rework and waste. Despite the surface inefficiency, these practices virtually multiplied the team’s capability without adding staff hours.

Approach at the Right Angle

The fourth step invites us to set our “angle of approach”: Where do we need to differ from expectations or reach out across lines? Where do we need to say “no”? For example, Jake included downstream departments in team meetings. He vigorously resisted staff reassignments. And he disciplined his team not to write any code before the specifications were finalized. In this way, he ensured that the team only wrote code that fully met the client’s specifications and was consistent with the deadline. If we do not diverge from the default pressures on the system, nothing will actually change.

Signal Through Action

The fifth step advises us not to start with talk, but to ask ourselves, How can we signal our commitment through action? For example, Jake simply showed up at the client meeting with a list of draft specifications, then said, “Rather than give you a blank sheet of paper, we thought we’d give you something to react to. Could you review these and tell us where we’re wrong?” This helped focus the client’s input, demonstrated that the team was on top of things, and showed a commitment to customer satisfaction. If they had waited to talk through the best approach, they might not have gotten started.

Listen and Amplify

If bootstrapping change requires many small, reciprocal actions, then we can drastically accelerate that process by paying closer attention to what is already underway. We can simply ask, What can we build on? How will we know when to take the next step? For example, after a while, Jake noticed that the joint team reviews were not producing new insights. Instead, he switched to a monthly check-in, which won him kudos with the team and sparked even more productivity. Many leaders dramatically accelerate progress by watching closely as their team’s capability grows and adapting in response.

Conclusion

Many people ask at what point a downward spiral tips to an upward one. The answer depends on the balance between growing and depleting flows. Results improve as the asset grows, which then enables reinvestment. (See “Basic Dynamics of Asset Growth.” The structure is similar to the inflows/outflows in a bathtub.) We can tip the spiral by increasing the growing function or reducing the depleting function. In this way, a small action can transform the functioning of the system as a whole.

As you have seen above, the upward spiral model is a sort of scalable invest-for-success strategy. By taking small steps to grow a core asset or stock and working on whatever is the most immediate barrier, we can reverse destructive downward cycles and mobilize growth, health, and regeneration. What may begin as unilateral efforts to spark collaboration can enable more coordinated action and more ambitious visions.

As Robert Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, even the tiny screw on the cover of the gas tank deserves your respect if, by stripping it, you cannot get to the engine. When a new barrier shows up, we need to zoom in and focus on it. As we make progress, we can zoom out and take bigger steps.

There is no faster way. If we are working effectively on the true constraint, we are making maximum progress. The good news is that, in some cases, barriers can shift in an instant. At its root, the upward spiral metaphor is about choosing what to do with whatever degrees of freedom we have. And its central, driving question is always the same: How do we move up from here?

Elizabeth Doty is the founder of WorkLore, a leadership consulting firm that uses systems thinking and story to help organizations such as Cisco, Archstone-Smith, and Stanford University build cultures of commitment and action. She is the author of The Compromise Trap: How to Thrive at Work without Selling your Soul. Elizabeth has given talks and workshops at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Pegasus’s Systems Thinking in Action Conference, and the Society for Organizational Learning. She is a Steward of the Bay Area Society for Organizational Learning and earned her MBA from the Harvard Business School.

The post The Upward Spiral: Bootstrapping Systemic Change appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

But no exponential growth process can continue forever. A system that is dominated by reinforcing loops will quickly encounter one or more limits. These limits will eventually cause some balancing loop to become dominant, a process known as shifting dominance. By better understanding reinforcing processes and shifting dominance, practitioners can more easily detect them in their early stages and intervene appropriately before they spiral out of control.

Purpose

Participants engage in this exercise to:

• experience some important physical features of a process that exhibits doubling and exponential growth
• confront the phenomenon of shifting dominance
• practice drawing and interpreting behavior over time graphs and causal loop diagrams.

Context

“Paper Fold” provides a wonderful illustration of the power of reinforcing processes. When we are struggling to help our clients or audience understand the behavior of some reinforcing loop that resides at the heart of a relevant issue, we often find it useful to take five minutes to do this activity. We like this exercise in part because of its simplicity and portability. If presented in the spirit of inquiry, exploration, and playfulness, “Paper Fold” can help participants confront their own misperceptions about causality and exponential growth in a nonthreatening way.

Equipment and Set-up

You need one small cocktail napkin or paper-towel square for each participant. A sheet of regular typing paper is too thin to work well.

If you don’t have enough napkins for everyone, you can hold one up and demonstrate folding it as outlined below. However, having people watch the exercise rather than experience it for themselves may reduce its impact.

Instructions

Instruct the group to do the following: “Take the napkin (or paper-towel square). Fold it in half, fold it in half again, and fold it in half again. Now fold it in half a fourth time. After four folds, it is about 1 cm or a 0.4 inch thick.” Continue, “Of course, you could not fold the napkin in half 29 more times. But if you could, how thick would it be?”

Because the answer to this question is highly counterintuitive, most people will not know it. To stimulate discussion, we suggest a number of different thicknesses and ask participants to raise their hand for the answer that seems most reasonable. For example, we say, “Who thinks it would be less than a foot thick? How about from the floor to the ceiling? How about from here to the top of the building?” Then we share the correct answer: “Folded 29 more times, this napkin would be 3,400 miles thick, the distance from Boston, MA to Frankfurt, Germany.”

Debrief

Most participants consider the correct answer totally preposterous and assume there is a trick to it. In debriefing the exercise, we suggest first demonstrating the math behind the answer. Use slides or a white board to show the dramatic outcome of doubling anything 33 times: 1, 2, 4, 8,16, etc. Doubling something 29 times increases it by a factor of about 540 million. After four folds, the napkin is about 0.4 inches thick. Doubling it 29 more times would produce a thickness of 216 million inches. A mile is about 63,400 inches, so the folded napkin would be a little over 3,400 miles thick.

At this point it is useful to ask people to draw the behavior over time graph for the thickness of the napkin, assuming that they could accomplish one fold every second for 33 seconds.

Depending on the time available, you may want to prepare other examples to further explore this dynamic. Population growth is a dramatic illustration that piques people’s interest. You can say, “We chose to illustrate 33 doublings in this activity for a reason. Today’s global population is almost 33 doublings from the first person on Earth. More than 6 billion people currently live on the planet. In other words, an individual relates to the planet’s population as the thickness of a single sheet of paper relates to the distance from Boston to Frankfurt.”

A traditional French riddle also illustrates the surprising nature of exponential growth: Suppose a water lily is growing on a pond in your backyard. The lily plant doubles in size each day. If the lily were allowed to grow unchecked, it would completely cover the pond in 30 days, choking out all other forms of life in the water. For a long time, the plant seems small, so you decide not to worry about cutting it back until it covers half the pond. How much time will you have to avert disaster, once the lily crosses your threshold for action? The answer is, “One day.” The water lily will cover half the pond on the 29th day, leaving you only 24 hours before it chokes out the life in your pond.

The behavior in all of these instances seems counter-intuitive. We generally expect things to follow linear patterns of growth. Linear growth occurs whenever a factor expands by a constant amount each time period. But positive feedback causes a factor to expand by a constant percentage each time period. In this second case, the change process starts slowly; in folding the napkin, no significant change is noticeable for many doublings. Then, although the underlying growth process hasn’t changed at all, an explosion seems to occur. The 34th doubling would actually add another 3,400 miles to the napkin’s thickness, as much as has accumulated throughout all past history.

To understand this behavior, it is useful to show a causal loop diagram of the underlying loop structure. If you have time, ask participants to work together in small groups to draw the simplest possible diagram that explains the growth in the napkin’s thickness.

Here, R1 is the dominant loop. For a constant folding rate, the greater the thickness of the napkin, the greater the amount added by folding. As the amount added by folding goes up, the thickness of the napkin increases as well.

Variation

If you have time, create two-person teams. One person folds and the other plots the thickness on a simple behavior over time chart, with the number of seconds (assuming one fold per second) on the horizontal axis and the thickness of the napkin on the vertical axis.

Did the groups’ behavior over time graphs look like the figure on p. 5? Obviously not. The teams find that it is impossible to fold the napkin more than seven or eight times. At that point, the thickness stops growing. The exponential growth plateaus once you can no longer fold the napkin What causes this behavior? The answer is: shifting dominance.

Initially, change in the napkin’s thickness is influenced only by the reinforcing loop (R1). At that point, growth in the napkin’s thickness does not produce any palpable increase in its stiffness. But as the thickness increases, the stiffness starts to increase. The resistance to folding grows until no amount of human effort can produce another fold. The balancing loop (B2) has become dominant.

Shifting dominance is an important phenomenon for all managers to comprehend. When it occurs, successful policies that have been learned and refined over time no longer work; they may even become counterproductive. Management lore is full of stories about leaders who mastered one way of attaining success by identifying and pushing on the dominant reinforcing loop governing progress in their firm. But then some limit emerges, perhaps in the market or among competitors. Because the company’s data system probably focuses only on the variables in the loop that used to be dominant, management’s control systems do not even register the change. Performance eventually falters, and management’s response is to push even harder on the policy levers that used to work—to no avail. By the time there is indisputable evidence that new loops are dominant, it may be too late to avoid permanent damage. Understanding the dynamics of shifting dominance can help managers react to changing conditions before it’s too late.

Linda Booth Sweeney is a doctoral student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on systemic innovation practices and the development of systemic thinking skills. Dennis Meadows is director of the Laboratory for Interactive Learning at the University of New Hampshire. He has co-authored eight books that illustrate the use of systems thinking to understand complex social and environmental issues.

The post Paper Fold: An Exercise in Exponential Growth appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell explores these and many other scenarios in his recent book The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Company, 2000), in an effort to understand how and why some trends become “epidemics.” He writes, “The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves . . . the rise of teenage smoking, the phenomenon of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” By studying patterns of extreme boom or bust, Gladwell believes that we can learn how to more effectively start and control positive “outbreaks” of our own.

Epidemics and the Tipping Point

What causes health-related as well as productor idea-related epidemics? Gladwell outlines three basic principles that have an impact on this kind of escalation:

• Ideas are contagious—people can infect one another with intellectual “viruses” as well as physical viruses;
• Little causes can have big effects— we know through systems thinking that what goes into any transaction, relationship, or system is not necessarily directly related to what comes out;
• Change doesn’t happen gradually but at one pivotal moment— “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”

The author says that these three concepts describe both how the flu or measles move through a grade-school classroom and how a few happy customers can turn a new, empty restaurant into a booming success. But Gladwell’s book is not just about epidemics—it explores in detail the notion that all epidemics have a “tipping point.” Gladwell defines the tipping point, which has been described in many classic sociology texts, as “that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.”

On a behavior over time graph, the tipping point is the instant when the line depicting a certain activity suddenly turns sharply upward or downward (see “The ‘Tipping Point’ for Hush Puppies”). And as Gladwell points out, there is more than one way to tip an epidemic. When an epidemic tips out of equilibrium, it is because some change has happened in one of three areas—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The Law of the Few

The first rule by which epidemics operate is that, in a given process or system, some people matter more than others. This principle explains why Paul Revere is famous for his midnight ride at the start of the American Revolution and William Dawes is not. Gladwell pinpoints three groups of people who are important in spreading an epidemic. Connectors—like Revere—have a special gift for bringing the world together and making friends and acquaintances. Paul Revere was not only a Connector, but he was also a Maven. A Maven is an information

THE 'TIPPING POINT FOR' HUSH PUPPIES

The “tipping point” for Hush Puppies shoes came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. Sales rose from 30,000 pairs a year, to 430,000 pairs in 1995, to four times that in 1996. The fad was inadvertently launched by kids in hip clubs and bars in down-town Manhattan, who wore the shoes precisely because no one else would wear them.

broker who accumulates knowledge about a lot of different products, prices, or places—and continually disseminates that information as needed. The third group of people important in an epidemic are Salesmen—those who have the skills to persuade others to take a certain course of action. All three kinds of people—Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen—are crucial to launching any social epidemic.

The Stickiness Factor

The content of the message is just as crucial as the messenger. Is the message—or product—so memorable that it can create change by spurring someone into action? The book explores how the producers of some children’s television programs, such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, continually conduct research into the “stickiness”—or appeal and memorability—of different episodes. They have found that when episodes are not “sticky,” children get bored and divert their attention elsewhere. Merely moving characters to different spots on the screen, combining various individuals in one segment, and repeating shows at certain intervals all influence the presentation of the ideas and the effectiveness of the final message. As Gladwell writes, “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, makes it irresistible.”

He also points out that the line between a customer’s hostility toward and acceptance of an idea is sometimes a lot narrower than we might think. For instance, marketers have long known that small changes to a direct-mail package can dramatically affect results. Gladwell cites a series of integrated advertisements for Columbia Record Club that included a gold box on the order form, coupled with TV commercials that revealed the “secret of the Gold Box.” The combination made the promotion enticingly “sticky,” and the results of the campaign were unprecedented.

The Power of Context

The third and final rule in The Tipping Point is that “epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” One could argue that Paul Revere’s ride was successful because he made it at night—when people were at home in bed, not off working in the fields. When researchers studied the violent crime rate in New York City, instead of focusing on the crimes themselves, they focused on the context within which much of the crime was occurring—the subway, where minor offenses such as graffiti and fare-beating were prevalent. Police officers on the streets also cracked down on lesser offenses such as public drunkenness, quickly discovering that seemingly insignificant quality-of-life misdemeanors were tipping points for more violent crimes.

“Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not do just what they think is right. They deliberately testtheir intuitions.”

What Gladwell calls the “150 Tipping Point”—the maximum number of people you can have in a group without experiencing structural impediments to the group’s ability to agree and act with one voice—is also related to this rule. Gore Associates, the multi-million-dollar high-tech firm that makes water-resistant GoreTex fabric, has designed its plants to include no more than 150 employees each for this reason. Essentially, “Gore has created . . . an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip—to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once.”

“Tipping” Toward Change

What do the ideas in The Tipping Point mean for people who are trying to create dramatic changes in organizations? Gladwell advises that starting epidemics requires concentrating resources in a few key areas. “If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then—whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software—he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople . . . to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.” Change agents ought to focus their efforts, then, on nurturing these groups.

The Tipping Point theory also demands that we reframe how we think about the world. Because of the limitations and peculiarities of the human mind and heart, the world does not operate in the way that we often assume it does. The author points out that, “Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not do just what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.” And while we like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner directed, in reality, we are powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. “That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because [it] is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”

Although it may seem like a long row to hoe toward significant change, Gladwell points out that simply by reaching the right people, we can shape the course of social epidemics. He writes, “Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.” Our challenge is to find that leverage point and to set the forces of change into motion.

Kellie Wardman O’Reilly is publications director at Pegasus Communications.

The post Encouraging the “Epidemic” Spread of Change appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

• An epidemic accelerates in proportion to the number of people exposed, which in turn increases the likelihood that the epidemic will spread even further.
• Downsizing is likely to reduce an executive’s ability to generate revenue (not just costs), which in turn decreases profits and increases pressure to downsize yet again.
• Acts of violence perpetrated by one party in a war stimulate acts of revenge by the other party, which in turn lead to violent retaliation by the first party and an ongoing escalation by both sides.

Although people are easily caught in vicious cycles, they often do not see these cycles as endless spirals and do not know how to escape the dynamic.

This article:

• Describes an easy way to identify vicious cycles that people are caught in;
• Explains a four-step process to transform this dynamic into an engine of success instead of failure;
• Will expand your thinking beyond simple vicious cycles to enrich your understanding of common problems and identify specific interventions for complex systems.

Doom Looping

One easy way to identify vicious cycles we are caught in is called “doom looping,” originally developed by Jennifer Kemeny. Doom looping has four steps:

1. Identify a problem symptom that concerns you because it seems to get worse and worse over time. For example, your symptom might be morale problems.
2. Identify three immediate and independent causes of the problem symptom. For example, three immediate causes of morale problems might be a difficult manager, lack of career opportunities, and job pressures and stress.
3. Clarify three immediate and independent consequences of the growing problem symptom. For example, three immediate consequences of morale problems are turnover, quality problems, and performance issues.
4. Finally, show how at least one of the consequences exacerbates at least one of the causes. The connection might be direct or indirect. For example, the consequence of turnover is that it increases workload for key personnel, which in turn increases job pressures and stress, thereby increasing morale problems and turnover even further (see “Vicious Cycles”). This dynamic is a vicious cycle or, in systems thinking parlance, a reinforcing feedback loop.

VICIOUS CYCLES

One easy way to identify vicious cycles we are caught in is called “Doom Looping.”

Transforming Vicious Cycles

Once you have identified a vicious cycle, you can look for where to break the cycle and ideally transform it into a positive engine of growth. This involves four steps:

1. Identify at least one link in the vicious cycle that is governed by people’s beliefs or assumptions instead of hard-wired into the system. This is a link that can be broken. To clarify this link, ask, “Is this cause-effect link inevitable, or can it be influenced by changing how people think and behave?”

   Example: “Do morale problems necessarily have to lead to high turnover?” Here the answer is “No,” because the existence of morale problems could just as well stimulate the active engagement of your best people—the ones most likely to leave first when things get bad—in turning around the organization. By contrast, once turnover occurs (especially of good people), the workload of key personnel is likely to increase and, as a result, so will job pressures and stress, and then morale problems. These links are more hardwired into the vicious cycle.

2. Redirect the causal factor in the weak link by creating a new goal. Ask, “What do we want to accomplish when this causal factor appears?”

   Example: “We want to establish a highly effective organization led by our best people at all levels.”

3. Clarify the corrective actions required to bridge the gap between where you are and the new goal.

   Example: “In order to increase morale and achieve the goal of an effective organization led by our best people at all levels, we will ask these people to reassess the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and lead task forces to capitalize on the most critical areas.

4. Implement reinforcing actions that sustain the new momentum. Because managers tend to be pulled by multiple demands, they often take their attention off of a new initiative once it appears to be moving forward. In order to ensure that the change in direction is sustained, it is important to implement actions that reinforce this direction over time.

   Example: The task force leaders can benefit from individual coaching and team learning meetings that enable them to overcome organizational resistance, deal with surprises, and increase each others’ effectiveness. This process should be followed by timely implementation of their recommendations and adjustments in the organizational infrastructure to support new ways of working.

Addressing More Complex Dynamics

Because vicious cycles are relatively easy to identify when things go wrong, we are tempted to see them everywhere we look. However, focusing on many vicious cycles tends to confuse people and limit their ability to identify effective interventions. There are two ways to make sense of multiple vicious cycles and key in on high-leverage interventions:

• The first is to simplify multiple vicious cycles by identifying the four to seven variables that people believe are most critical to the problem. Next, depict how these variables interact with each other by drawing no more than two or three loops. Once you have simplified the number of loops, use the above method for breaking and transforming vicious cycles to develop an intervention strategy.
• The second approach is to recognize that vicious cycles tend to disguise and dominate more complex dynamics. These dynamics can often be depicted initially as systems archetypes. Archetypes provide a rich, comprehensive explanation of what is happening while still being easy to understand. In addition to providing clarity that is both sophisticated and accessible, systems archetypes enable people to target more specific high-leverage interventions.

Example: If a vicious cycle is created when people use a quick fix to reduce a problem symptom, draw the “Fixes That Backfire” (also known as the “Fixes That Fail”) archetype, and apply interventions for producing a sustainable solution (see, for example, Systems Archetypes Basics: From Story to Structure by Daniel H. Kim andVirginia Anderson, Pegasus Communications, 1998). If one or more vicious cycles increase dependence on a quick fix and undermine your ability to implement a more fundamental long-term solution, show the “Shifting the Burden” archetype and use interventions designed to support this solution.

Other dynamics where vicious cycles tend to dominate include:

• Success to the Successful—one part of the system performs better and better over time at the expense of decreasing success of another part;
• Accidental Adversaries—the unintended consequences of actions taken by two potential collaborators undermine each other’s effectiveness;
• Competing Goals—efforts to achieve too many goals for too many different parties reduce their ability to accomplish any goal satisfactorily;
• Escalation—two parties continuously amplify their activities to defeat the other without ever achieving a sustainable advantage.

In sum: Identifying vicious cycles is often a great place to start applying systems thinking to chronic, complex problems. At the same time, people can often gain richer insight and even greater leverage by testing for and depicting the systems archetypes that produce these cycles.

David Peter Stroh is a principal of Applied Systems Thinking and founder and principal of www.bridgewaypartners.com. David is an expert in applying systems thinking to organizational and social change. You can contact him at dstroh@appliedsystemsthinking.com.

This article is adapted with permission from the Applied Systems Thinking Library. © Applied Systems Thinking 2006

The post Identifying and Breaking Vicious Cycles appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

• Quickly capturing your hypotheses about the causes of dynamics;
• Eliciting and capturing the mental models of individuals and teams;
• Communicating the important feedback processes you believe are responsible for a problem.

The conventions for drawing CLDs are simple but should be followed faithfully. Think of CLDs as musical scores: At first, you may find it difficult to construct and interpret these diagrams, but with practice, you will soon be sight-reading. In this article, I present some important guidelines that can help you make sure your CLDs are accurate and effective in capturing and communicating the feedback structure of complex systems.

Avoid Ambiguity in Labeling Causal Links

AMBIGUITY OF LINKS

To be effective, your CLD should not include any ambiguous causal links. Ambiguous polarities usually mean there are multiple causal pathways that you should show separately.

People sometimes argue that a specific link in a CLD can be either positive or negative, depending on other parameters or on where the system is operating. For example, we might draw a diagram that relates a firm’s revenue to the price of its product and then argue that the link between price and company revenue can be either positive or negative, depending on the elasticity of demand (see “Ambiguity of Links”). A higher price means less revenue if a 1 percent increase in price causes demand to fall more than 1 percent. This link would be labeled with a negative sign. But less elastic demand might mean a 1 percent increase in price causes demand to fall less than 1 percent, so revenues would then rise, resulting in a positive link polarity.

When you have trouble assigning a clear and unambiguous sign to a link, it usually means there is more than one causal pathway connecting the two variables. You should make these different pathways explicit in your diagram. The correct diagram for the impact of price on revenue would show that price has at least two effects on revenue: (1) it determines how much revenue is generated per unit sold (a positive link), and (2) it affects the number of units sold (usually a negative link).

Is It Reinforcing or Balancing?

There are two methods for determining whether a loop is reinforcing or balancing: the fast way and the right way. The fast way, which you may have learned when you first started working with CLDs, is to count the number of negative links—represented by “-” or “o”—in the loop (see “‘+’ and ‘-’ Vs. ‘s’ and ‘o’”). If the number is even, the loop is reinforcing; if the number is odd, the loop is balancing. However, this method can sometimes fail, because it is all too easy to mislabel a link’s polarity or miscount the number of negative links.

The right way is to trace the effect of a small change in one of the variables around the loop. Pick any variable in the loop. Now imagine that it has changed (increased or decreased), and trace the effect of this change around the loop. If the change feeds back to reinforce the original change, it is a reinforcing loop. If it opposes the original change, it is a balancing loop. This method works no matter how many variables are in a loop and no matter where you start.

Make the Goals of Balancing Loops Explicit

All balancing loops have goals, which are the system’s desired state. Balancing loops function by comparing the actual state to the goal, then initiating a corrective action in response to the discrepancy between the two. It is often helpful to make the goals of your balancing loops explicit, usually by adding a new variable, such as “desired product quality” (see Desired Product Quality in “Explicit Goals”). The diagram shows a balancing loop that affects the quality of a company’s product: The lower the quality, the more quality improvement programs the company initiates, which, if successful, correct the quality shortfall.

EXPLICIT GOALS

Making goals explicit in balancing loops encourages people to ask questions about how the goals are formed. For example, what drives a company’s desired level of quality?

Making goals explicit encourages people to ask how the goals are formed; for instance, who determines desired product quality and what criteria do they use to make that determination? Hypotheses about the answers to these questions can then be incorporated in the diagram. Goals can vary over time and respond to pressures in the environment, such as customer input or the quality of competing products.

Making the goals of balancing loops explicit is especially important when the loops capture human behavior—showing the goals prompts reflection and conversation about the aspirations and motives of the actors. But often it is important to represent goals explicitly even when the loop doesn’t involve people at all.

Represent Causation Rather Than Correlation

Every link in your diagram must represent what you and your colleagues believe to be causal relationships between the variables. In a causal relationship, one variable has a direct effect on another; for instance, a change in the birth rate alters the total population. You must be careful not to include correlations between variables in your diagrams. Correlations between variables reflect a system’s past behavior, not its underlying structure. If circumstances change, if previously dormant feedback loops become dominant, or if you experiment with new decisions and policies, previously reliable correlations among variables may break down.

ICE-CREAM SALES AND MURDERS

Causal loop diagrams must include only what you believe to be genuine causal relationships, never correlations, no matter how strong.

For example, though sales of ice cream are positively correlated with the murder rate, you may not include a link from ice-cream sales to murder in your CLD. Such a causal link suggests that cutting ice-cream consumption would slash the murder rate and allow society to cut the budget for police and prisons. Obviously, this is not the case: Both ice-cream consumption and violent crime tend to rise in hot weather. But the example illustrates how confusing correlations with causality can lead to terrible misjudgments and policy errors (see “Ice Cream Sales and Murders”).

While few people are likely to attribute murders to the occasional double-dip cone, many correlations are more subtle, and it is often difficult to determine the underlying causal structure. A great deal of scientific research seeks the causal needles in a huge haystack of correlations: Can eating oat bran reduce cholesterol, and if it does, will your risk of a heart attack drop? Does economic growth lead to lower birth rates, or is the lower rate attributable to literacy, education for women, and increasing costs of child-rearing?

Do companies with serious quality improvement programs earn superior returns for stockholders?

Scientists have learned from experience that reliable answers to such questions are hard to come by and require dedication to the scientific method—controlled experiments; randomized, double-blind trials; large samples; long-term followup studies; replication; statistical inference; and so on. In social and human systems, such experiments are difficult, rare, and often impossible. You must take extra care to determine that the relationships in your CLDs are causal, no matter how strong a correlation may be.

John D. Sterman is the J. Spencer Standish Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of MIT’s System Dynamics Group.

This article is part of a 2-part series. Click here to view the second part.

The post Fine-Tuning Your Causal Loop Diagrams—Part I appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The first question seemed important because it appeared that both sides had been moving toward a peaceful settlement since 1993, when they signed the Oslo Accords. Certain parts of the West Bank had been returned to full Palestinian control on an agreed-upon path to Palestinian statehood, and the newly formed Palestinian Authority had publicly announced its acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. Just two months before we moved to Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Barak had made the strongest Israeli offer yet for completing negotiations and paving the way for a Palestinian state comprising most of the West Bank and Gaza—although, much to the surprise of most Israelis, the offer was rejected.

The second question seems almost inevitable in human relations when things do not go the way people want them to. Instead of considering our responsibility for creating certain situations, we quickly seek to blame others. Moreover, in this case, there were plenty of likely candidates: Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who turned down Barak’s breakthrough offer; Ariel Sharon, the Israeli right-wing leader whose visit to the Al Aqsa mosque complex sparked the Palestinian riots; Barak, for appearing to force the Palestinian leadership into a corner and refusing to meet with Arafat face-to-face at Camp David; and President Clinton, for appearing to side with Israel against the Palestinians during these same negotiations.

As unavoidable as these two questions are, I believe they are the wrong ones. As a systems thinker trained to look for the non-obvious interdependencies producing chronic problems, I found it pointless to ask “Why now?” about a conflict that has been going on for anywhere from 30-50 years at a minimum to nearly 4,000 years at the extreme. Similarly, it made little sense to blame anyone when the conflict has extended well beyond the political if not physical lifetimes of most of the leaders mentioned above and other participants in the current crisis.

Instead, I began to ask a different set of questions:

• Why does this problem persist despite people’s extensive efforts to solve it?
• Why do Israelis invest so much to increase their sense of security, yet feel so insecure?
• Why do Palestinians, despite enduring the loss of lives and extreme economic hardship, gain so little of the respect and sovereignty they try so hard to achieve?
• Why is it difficult for those people on both sides who want a workable compromise to gain sufficient support for solutions they perceive as possible?
• Where is the leverage in the conflict, that is, what can people do to produce a sustainable systemwide solution?

The field of systems thinking is especially effective for enabling people to understand why they have been unsuccessful in solving chronic problems despite their best efforts. While a systems view can’t fully answer these questions, it can illuminate how people think—and the consequences of their thoughts and actions on the results they achieve—in ways that can help them see and achieve sustainable new solutions. By understanding the exact nature of the vicious circles we have been trapped in, we can create new patterns of relationships that serve us better. I set about to apply systems thinking to the Middle East crisis to see if I could shed light on possible ways out of the ongoing tragedy.

A Four-Stage Cycle

My view is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proceeds through a pattern of four stages: 1. Both sides fight for the right to exist. 2. The tension escalates. 3. Pressure leads to negotiations. 4. Peace efforts break down.

When peace efforts break down, the two sides cycle back to the first stage and intensify their fight for the right to exist (see “A Cycle of Violence”). From a systemic perspective, this pattern of behavior indicates that the “solutions” that the two parties are employing are unintentionally making the problem worse, or at least perpetuating it.

1. Both Sides Fight for the Right to Exist. What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so intractable is that both sides see themselves battling to establish their basic right to exist. Israelis and Palestinians have become ardent enemies because each claims the same land. While some voices on each side acknowledge the right of the other to exist and are willing to exchange land for peace, others— often the more dominant voices— deny this right and refuse to negotiate. As a result, many ask, “How can coexistence be an option when the other side challenges our right to exist?”

Israel’s fears about its existence are justified by past events. The country came into being in 1948, shortly after one-third of the world’s Jews were exterminated in World War II. Immediately after it was founded, Israel was threatened by five surrounding Arab states, which vowed to “drive the Jews into the sea.” The Arabs felt that the partition proposed by the British and agreed on by the U. N. took land away from Arabs who had lived there for generations. Border raids by Egypt and Syria led to additional wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. To protect its northern border, Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.

Israelis interpret many Palestinian actions as proof that the Palestinians do not recognize their right to exist. For example, the current Intifada, the Palestinians’ demand for the full right of return of its refugees to their homeland in what is now Israel, and continued anti-Semitic incidents abroad remind them of their vulnerability and the need for a Jewish state.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian people have never controlled their own destiny. The Ottoman Empire controlled their land for 400 years. The British took over in 1917 and ruled Palestine until 1948. In the Israeli War of Independence, an estimated 600,000 Palestinian refugees fled parts of Palestine that were later absorbed by Israel. Their numbers, including descendants, have now swelled into the millions. Jordan took over rule of the Palestinian West Bank from the British and held it until 1967, when Israel won that territory during the Six-Day War. Since then, Israel has established, expanded, and consistently defended settlements in the West Bank—often land lived on for centuries by Palestinians. Palestinians have frequently received a hostile reception through-out the Arab world. Since 1970, their attempts to resettle first in Jordan and then in Egypt and Syria were largely denied. Palestinians who have established themselves in Lebanon cannot practice professions. The only country that currently recognizes Palestinians as citizens is Jordan. Many suffer in refugee camps throughout the region, hoping to return to the lands they were forced to flee.

In their efforts to assert their right to exist, most Palestinians and Israelis will only consider two options: One is to negotiate an agreement of peaceful coexistence that divides the land of Palestine into two viable states; the other is to try to maintain or wrest control of all of the land at the expense of the other party. For a long time, many on both sides seemed to favor the first alternative, despite the powerful influence of extremists acting to achieve the second. But the profound mistrust the Israelis and Palestinians have developed for each other has caused more people on both sides to be drawn to the second alternative, despite the costs involved.

Two powerful factors entice both sides to fight for control of all the land: threat and desire. For most Israelis, the primary threat is to their security. Since 1967, the country’s policies have also been fueled by the desire of a powerful minority of religious Jews to retain control over the historical Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, which constitute much of the West Bank. Israel’s response to threats to its security, as well as to pressures from the religious right, has been to control Palestinian movements through-out the territory through blockades, check points, and permits—actions that might be consider edmilitarily defensible but that are often implemented in ways that feel humiliating to the Palestinians. Israel has conducted targeted assassinations, bombed strategic Palestinian infrastructure, appropriated additional land to protect the settlers, defended the violent acts of some settlers, and killed civilians when under attack.

For Palestinians, the threat to their existence involves not just the lack of a homeland but the lack of respect they perceive from others. They feel ignored for the losses they have incurred and demeaned by both the actions and broken promises of the Israelis. Their anger at their history of mistreatment by foreign rulers, fanned by an Israeli occupation of the West Bank that the U. N. considers illegal (U. N. Resolution 242 defines the West Bank as “occupied territory”), leads them to demand respect as well as sovereignty. Furthermore, although Palestinian moderates would accept a viable state that has contiguous borders within the West Bank, comprises almost all of the West Bank and Gaza, and includes East Jerusalem as its capital, many Palestinians dream of reclaiming all of the land of their forebears—a reclamation that would result in the elimination of Israel.

Because their military position is weak relative to Israel’s, Palestinians fight through sniper attacks, verbal incitement, and suicide bombings against civilians. They justify their reliance on violence by observing that, in the past, Israel has not kept its promises unless it was physically provoked. For example, many view Israel’s decision to remove all of its soldiers from southern Lebanon in the spring of 2000 as a response to the violent resistance of Hezbollah fighters. Palestinian leaders also maintain strict controls over the information available to their own people—for example, by denying Israel’s existence in student textbooks and maps—and incite refugees to believe that they will one day reclaim all of their land.

A CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict proceeds through a pattern of four stages: Both sides fight for the right to exist; the tension escalates; pressure leads to negotiations; and peace efforts break down (R1). When peace efforts break down, the two sides cycle back to the first stage. This pattern of behavior indicates that the “solutions” that the two parties are employing are unintentionally making the problem worse, or at least perpetuating it.

2. The Tension Escalates. Over time, both sides have grown increasingly dependent on the strategy of retaliation (see “Dependence on Retaliation”). As one side gains a temporary advantage in its battle for legitimacy, the other acts to regain its own advantage. This pattern of escalation manifests in several ways:

• Israel uses military force and constraints on Palestinians’ movement to retaliate for Palestinian actions.
• Palestinians perpetrate violence against Israeli citizens and encourage their people to deny Israel’s right to exist.
• Each side perceives itself as a victim of the other’s aggression instead of seeing how its own actions contribute to the escalating conflict.

In the short term, each group’s strategies to claim its right to exist succeed. Through their containment policies, Israelis reaffirm, “They cannot force us to leave.” Through violent resistance, Palestinians reaffirm, “They will have to take us seriously.” In the long term, however, both sides fail to see the unintended consequences of their actions: They only increase the feelings of threat experienced by the other side, motivating them to act to reduce these attacks and regain their own sense of legitimacy—even as the loss of life and other costs increase.

For example, Israeli actions have increased economic hardship for Palestinians, deepened their feelings of humiliation and indignation, and led to significant losses of life. (According to U. N. estimates, as of December 2001,15 months after the Al Aqsa Intifada began, approximately 800 Palestinians had been killed, and the Palestinian economy was losing $11 million per day. The death toll has climbed with the recent escalation in violence on both sides.) In response, the Palestinians have become more unified and motivated to take even bolder actions; suicide bombings now occur several times a week. In the words of Jibril Rajoub, head of preventive security for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, many Palestinians feel that “We have nothing left to lose.” In turn, greater resistance has only served to increase Israel’s determination to defend all of the land. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post states, “What must be defeated is the Hezbollah model—the idea that if you kill a few Israelis for long enough, they will get tired and leave.”

DEPENDENCE ON RETALIATION

Both sides have grown increasingly dependent on retaliation in response to threats to their right to exist (B2). In the long term, this strategy only increases the feelings of threat experienced by the other side (R4) and undermines the fundamental solution—negotiations for peaceful coexistence (R5). Third parties contribute to the conflict when they take sides (R6).

This cycle of retaliation is further compounded by the fact that both parties perceive themselves as victims of forces beyond their control. Palestinians claim they are victims of Israeli aggression; Israelis feel besieged by the entire Arab world. Each side emphasizes how the other’s actions hurt it while ignoring how its own actions hurt the other party. Because the self-perception of powerlessness is so deeply ingrained in the psyches of both peoples, it is very difficult for them to perceive that they have now become aggressors as well as victims. Each fails to see their own responsibility for increasing the levels of threat they experience—and fails to consider actions they might take to reduce these threats.

3. Pressure Leads to Negotiations. Only when the loss of life and resources incurred by both sides reaches a critical point do people begin to question the viability of resolving the conflict by force. In tandem with changes in the larger geopolitical forces affecting the region, this questioning eventually prompts a renewal of peace negotiations. We have seen this cycle occur several times, for example, when the failure of the first Intifada and the fall of the Soviet Union led to meetings in Madrid in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, and when, after the assassination of staunch peace advocate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the extremism of the hardline government of Benyamin Netanyahu, Israelis elected the more liberal Barak in 1999.

Many on both sides believed they had reached a potential breakthrough in negotiations when, at Camp David in the summer of 2000, Barak offered the Palestinians most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem—an offer that Arafat rejected. Even after the Camp David meeting dissolved and the Al Aqsa Intifada began, parties on both sides continued to meet. At Taba in January 2001, they came very close to an agreement that many on both sides believe will eventually be the basis for a negotiated settlement.

4. Peace Efforts Break Down. Despite signs of a significant breakthrough on the most difficult issues, all peace efforts have inevitably broken down. Long-term dependence on destructive ways of resolving the conflict have led to profound mistrust and hatred. This hostility undermines the peace process in two fundamental ways. First, it decreases commitment by both sides to pursuing peaceful coexistence and strengthens people’s dreams of recovering all of the land. Second, it weakens the trust-building process by leading to a series of conditions, mixed messages, and broken promises.

Because of the build-up of mistrust and hatred, many people believe that a peace agreement can only be reached with the aid of international brokers—both at the negotiating table and on the ground thereafter. However, using brokers is problematic because each group tries to get the third parties to take sides—something the international community is not immune to doing. The United States has historically sided with Israel, and the European Community has generally sided with the Palestinian cause. As a result, both Israelis and Palestinians succeed in deflecting responsibility for the conflict and perpetuating the cycles of blame and victimization, rather than being accountable for their own destructive actions.

Extremist Actions

Remarkably, despite all of these barriers, at times the peace process appears to move forward. After the Oslo Accords, Israel ceded parts of the West Bank to Palestinian control, and the Palestinian leadership arrested Palestinian extremists. Informal dialogues as well as more formal negotiations on common issues such as water management grew, and people on both sides believed that peace could be achieved. Even after the Al Aqsa Intifada had raged for nearly a year, the worldwide coalition developed after September 11 to fight global terrorism gave both Israelis and Palestinians hope that the international community would finally succeed in getting them to agree to a sensible and honorable peace.

But no matter how intelligently and well designed a peace agreement may be, some people will perceive themselves as losers. Effective compromise is likely to mean that Israel will surrender most of the West Bank and all of Gaza and accept some symbolic right of return for Palestinians. In exchange, the Palestinians would recognize that Israel has the right to retain control over the remainder of the territory. In this scenario, Israeli settlers and right wingers would have to give up their homes and their dream of control over the promised lands of Judea and Samaria. Palestinian losers would include radical groups and refugees who have survived in terrible conditions in camps and who still dream of reclaiming all of the former Palestine.

To extremist groups on both sides, a compromise is unacceptable. When peace appears too near, they strike the ultimate blow to its realization. For example, the murder of nearly 30 Palestinians in a mosque by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein is one of several Israeli actions that disrupted progress on the Oslo Accords. Bombs set off by the radical Palestinian group Hamas in 1996 are partly to blame for the failure of Israeli Labor Party leader Shimon Peres to get elected and fulfill Rabin’s promise of peace.

Extremist violence does not need to be directed against the other side in order to be effective. A Jewish settler assassinated Rabin, perhaps Israel’s most effective advocate for peaceful coexistence. Palestinian extremists have also murdered fellow Palestinians who pursue coexistence as a legitimate option. Nor do extremists need to act violently to be effective; they can also make unreasonable demands. For example, many believe that Arafat’s insistence on a full right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israeli territory was the breaking point in the July 2000 Camp David talks. Others view Sharon’s insistence on a total cessation of Palestinian violence in order for peace talks to resume as an impossible standard intended specifically to stall further negotiations.

Whatever the method used, the actions of an extreme few seem to successfully undermine compromises that would benefit the majority of both peoples. Such events set off additional rounds of blocking, incitement, and fighting that only serve to build further mistrust and hatred and undermine negotiations.

Systemic Solutions

What does this analysis suggest in terms of systemic solutions to resolve the conflict? I believe that both the protagonists and third parties must:

• Accept that their current solutions are a dead end and hurt themselves—not just the other party.
• Think systemically before taking new action.
• Reduce threats to the other side—and be willing to take risks for peace.
• Reaffirm the goal of peaceful coexistence, reiterating that both sides have rights to live in viable states in former Palestine—and that both grieve the dream of recovering all of the land.
• Expect the international community to hold both sides responsible for their actions—and give up favoring either one.

POSSIBLE LEVERAGE POINTS FOR CHANGE

Successful interventions often involve breaking a link between variables or changing variables. Before beginning to intervene in this long-standing cycle of violence, Palestinians, Israelis, and the international community need to think systemically and accept that current approaches are a dead end.

Accept That Current Solutions Are a Dead End. While some observers do recognize the vicious cycle in which both sides are caught up, most Palestinians and Israelis are unable to see how their own actions hurt their cause. Currently, each side tends to hear the solutions offered by third parties as actions that the other side should take but won’t; thus, current solutions have reached a dead end. By taking a systemic perspective on the ongoing conflict, perhaps each group will be able to see actions it can take in its own best interests. To that end, both Israelis and Palestinians must become aware that:

• They are weakening their own positions through actions that gain them temporary advantage only to leave them more threatened and frustrated in the long term.
• Neither side can succeed in claiming its own right to exist without also having to acknowledge this right for the other.
• Any actions that don’t acknowledge each other’s rights will lead only to greater threats to Israeli security and Palestinian sovereignty—and to greater losses of life and material resources on both sides.
• Because each side is an aggressor as well as a victim, it can do more than it believes, individually and in cooperation with the other party, to change the situation.

Whatever past injustices have led Israelis and Palestinians to this point, in the present they are both responsible for their actions. Both have the opportunity to act in wise ways that ensure a more creative and satisfying future for all. To the extent that each group understands how its actions unwittingly undermine its own cause, they can then initiate and implement more sustainable proposals for peace.

Think Systemically Before Taking New Action. Thinking systemically involves:

1. Testing the underlying mental models that drive so much of people’s behavior.
2. Shifting from the question “Who is to blame?” to “Where is the leverage in the dynamic between the two sides?” Letting go of blame does not necessarily mean letting go of anger, though it does mean finding solutions that create less pain and anger in the future.
3. Asking, “What can we do to break the spiral of retaliation and revenge?” While the vicious cycle is now painfully obvious to both sides, what is less clear is that it can only be broken if each side takes its own initiative to act differently.
4. Considering the unintended consequences of proposed solutions.

Reduce Threats to Both Sides. Instead of being so concerned about whether or not the other side will change (a source of repeated failures to deescalate the conflict), each side needs to focus on what it can do to initiate change. Additionally, before taking any action, each should consider the following questions:

• What are the benefits of our actions in the short term?
• What are the likely consequences of these actions in the long term?
• How will the other side likely react to our actions?
• What will we do when they react?
• Will our actions and their likely reactions produce the outcome we want?

These questions indicate that the first step each party can take in its own best interest is to reduce threats to the other side. In other words, each side must make more efforts to reduce threats on the ground and not limit its actions to discussions at the negotiating table.

Israel can act in ways that demonstrate respect for the Palestinian people without losing sight of its own security needs. This means freezing investment in settlements and reclamation of land where Palestinians live, eliminating acts of harassment and humiliation that do little to bolster security, and allowing Palestinians to move freely as the violence subsides. Palestinians can reduce both violence and incitement while continuing to claim their right to a state with viable borders. They can engage in nonviolent resistance while validating Israel’s right to exist.

Reducing threats not only minimizes defensive reactions, but it softens the mistrust and hatred that have prolonged the conflict. Doing so will likely make both sides feel more comfortable returning to the negotiating table. Once the two sides reach agreement, they then need to keep the promises they make instead of finding loopholes that only lead to further escalation.

At the same time, each side must be prepared to take risks to achieve peace. Israel must not only insist on creating secure borders, but also be willing to risk that it has both the military strength and moral high ground to thoroughly defend Israeli lives and territory within pre-1967 borders. Palestinians must not only insist on a viable state with contiguous borders within the West Bank and Gaza, but also be willing to risk that they can develop their own state effectively and efficiently. While these risks feel very real to both sides, the risks to safety and sovereignty they currently face are untenable.

Reaffirm the Goal of Peaceful Coexistence. Ultimately, any compromise requires that both sides give up their respective dreams of controlling all of Palestine. Making this choice means preparing people on both sides to accept that they will achieve less than what they really want. It means grieving the loss of the dream and claiming the best that this situation has to offer. It means containing the extremists on both sides and not allowing their actions to deter the compromise that benefits the majority of people on both sides. For Israelis, it means preparing to welcome back the settlers who have risked their lives to populate all of “the promised land.” For Palestinians, it means accepting the Jews’ historical claims to this part of the world and setting realistic expectations for Palestinians’ right of return to what is now Israel.

Both sides need to replace the dream of recovering all of the land with a dream of peaceful coexistence. Palestinians can focus on channeling the determination and education of their relatively young population—as well as support from the international community—into peaceful lives, economic well-being, and global respect. Israelis can focus on directing their enormous creativity and energy toward producing environmental, social, and economic advancements that benefit all of its population.

Expect the International Community to Hold Both Sides Responsible. Third parties drawn into the conflict will only be effective when, rather than taking sides, they hold both sides responsible for the conflict and condition their engagement on actions taken by both to resolve it. Third parties can take four additional actions to support peacemaking:

• Validate the pain and anger experienced by both sides without feeding a cycle of blame and revenge. Empathizing with statements such as “This terrible thing happened to me” can lead to true healing, while buying into accusations such as “They did this to me” only supports further helplessness and reactivity.
• Validate people’s belief that any new peace process within the existing framework is likely to fail. The process will fail as long as each side believes it can take the same actions and get a different result or waits for signs that the other side is changing. However, it can succeed if both sides change their own behavior and trust that the other party will do the same.
• Anticipate and explicitly address the pitfalls of entering the peace process. Acknowledge that, historically, negotiations have been weakened by conditions, mixed messages, and broken promises, and that extremists take actions to undermine agreements when peace appears near. Encourage both sides to address these negotiation issues before they become a problem, contain their extremists, and educate their people to refrain from revenge if the extremists strike.
• Be prepared to provide on-the-ground support. Until now, the international community has been reluctant to commit on-the-ground support to help each side keep the agreements. Given current levels of mistrust and hatred, third-party brokers might need to establish a physical presence as well as provide financial aid to achieve the required changes.

Balance of Power?

Some Israeli and Palestinian reviewers of this work have challenged one particular aspect of the analysis—it assumes that both sides have equal power in and responsibility for the current situation. Clearly, Israel has more power militarily and economically, and Palestinians have suffered more in terms of human casualties and economic hardship. I believe, however, that balance exists precisely because neither side has succeeded in eliminating the claims of the other to the land they inhabit. The ongoing impasse suggests that Palestinians’ strengths in terms of determination, armed resistance, and incitement have compensated for what they lack in other resources. Palestinians also have veto power at the negotiating table, which they used pointedly at Camp David.

Both sides also have external supporters and detractors that appear to balance out their respective power. Israel is strongly supported by the U. S., while it’s criticized internationally for not honoring U. N. Resolution 242 recognizing the West Bank as occupied territory. Its neighbors in the Middle East accept its existence only reluctantly, if at all, while some threaten to destroy it. Moreover, global anti-Semitism still exists, as exemplified by a recent U. N. conference on racism that turned into an almost singular attack on Zionism. Palestinians, on the other hand, receive strong verbal encouragement from their Arab neighbors to fight for statehood—even though these same neighbors treat Palestinians poorly in their own countries and often fail to follow through on financial promises. Most of the official money that sustains Palestinians comes from Europe (and ironically from Israel, when it permits Palestinians to work there). Other Arab leaders fear that if Palestinians were to achieve statehood, it might stimulate popular uprisings in their countries—something that these nations do everything to repress.

A systemic viewpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian situation inevitably points to the interdependent and unintentionally self-destructive nature of both sides’ actions. Each party has a role in creating and perpetuating the conflict, and each must take responsibility for doing what it can to resolve it. Becoming aware of how their own actions unwittingly undermine their effectiveness and accepting the limits of what they can create are essential ingredients for both the Palestinians and the Israelis to achieve the security, respect, and sovereignty that each deserve.

David Peter Stroh (davidpstroh@earthlink.net) is a cofounder of Innovation Associates and a charter member of the Society for Organizational Learning.

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