When asked how he managed to accomplish this feat, Spielberg credited the use of a large, aerial-perspective map that effectively captured the entire story as well as the camera locations. This rich image, which was much more detailed than a normal film storyboard, showed everyone on the production what was supposed to happen to whom and when. The detailed picture helped the crew come to a shared mindset and allowed them to work quickly and effectively.

Everyone knew the desired result as well as the detailed steps along the way. People on the production could place their efforts in the context of the big picture. They were all on the same page, so to speak; it just happened to be a very big one posted around all four walls of Spielberg’s hotel room.

Old Wine in New Bottles

Of course, the use of pictures to convey messages, encourage dialogue, and shape people’s perspectives is nothing new. A lot of art has this quality, including religious art. Take, for instance, Botticelli’s La Primavera. In the painting, Venus looks out at viewers and, by the gesture of her right hand, asks them to choose which of the Three Graces they should emulate. It is an image designed to challenge the Medici princes of Florence to think about what sort of leadership they should provide: Should they lead with a deeper spiritual quality or should they go for short-term pleasure and gain?

Pictures are effective because they can convey complexity as well as make manifest people’s mental models. For these reasons, they can be useful in a corporate setting in helping leaders articulate their thinking, encouraging organization-wide dialogue to promote greater engagement in strategy and building a shared vision about what the future should look like and how to achieve it. A visual depiction is far more useful than words alone in helping a community of people create common ground.

“Learning Pictures” are a tool used to help people align their thinking about conceptual matters, such as strategy, the nature of change, organizational performance, the competitive landscape, and organizational dynamics. They are large, colorful representations of the business situation, created by a consultant or facilitator with the support of a graphic designer or artist based on input from a leadership team (see “Sample Learning Picture”). The images are then used as a catalyst for group dialogue, usually with a facilitator and one of the leaders involved in creating the picture. Once the picture has been used in these dialogue sessions with people from throughout the organization, they inevitably end up being put on a wall and used for other communication tasks, such as during orientation for new employees.

Done well, a Learning Picture helps to create what Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja, in Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (Crown, 2000), call “line of sight” understanding. This kind of understanding, they say, “provides an overview of the strategic context. It enables employees on the shop floor to see the direct connection between what they do and the overall corporate results.”

The Process

Leaders responsible for achieving new levels of performance and capability sometimes jump into action without first having thought clearly about the outcomes they seek to achieve. If the wider community of employees has only a tenuous grasp on the strategic outcomes and how they are to be achieved, then their chances of realizing them are severely compromised. Likewise, if the members of the leadership team do not have a similar view about “the what” and “the how,” then they have little hope of arriving at the destination. Thus, the process of creating a Learning Picture is often as useful to the organization as the result.

The process follows six steps:

1. Elicit the Big Picture. In this step, the team accountable for delivering the strategic change participates in a facilitated workshop. The workshop lasts about two to three hours and focuses on the following:
   1. The end state that is desired, the vision (the what)
   2. The challenges and a map through them (the how)
   3. The case for change (the why)

   Most of the focus is on the end state. The facilitator’s task is to probe what this will look and feel like and to drill down to specific details, such as: What sort of relationships will there be between the company and its stakeholders/customers? What will the working environment be like? How will leadership be exercised? What will be different? What are the dominant chains of cause and effect? What will be leading indicators of success? How will key functions interact and how will they create value across departments? What cultural artifacts will be employed to substantiate the desired culture? What would a visitor from another planet see?

   If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to shared mindset.

   The key is to elicit participants’ mental models about the future and align them around one version.

   Throughout the session, the facilitator listens for visual metaphors and imagery. At the end of the workshop, participants agree on a visual metaphor for the Learning Picture that might act as the core theme.

   Some possible metaphors include:

   • Islands in the sea
   • Landscape with hills and rivers
   • Built environment with roads, shops, and factories
   • Formula 1 racing
   • Aviation, airports, and airliners
   • The globe showing connected communities and other networking themes
   • Mountains
   • A maze
   • The inside of a computer

   A strategic or conceptual artist – a graphic designer/illustrator who can use standard illustration software – listens to the discussion and starts to conceptualize the Learning Picture with the help of the consultant/facilitator, who acts as a bridge between the group and the artist.

2. Design the Learning Picture. The next stage is to think about the main themes that emerged from the facilitated discussion. With one client, the challenge was to integrate a new function with two existing business units. The management team hit upon the idea of representing the groups in a Learning Picture that showed them all collaborating in a working environment of the future. The image shows people interacting in new ways and leveraging new tools and information to achieve unprecedented outcomes.The management team felt that people in the organization needed to be more interdependent and share information without the intervention of the head office. To depict that concept, the Learning Picture showed one business function in the center with another supporting it around the outside and then further layers of support above and beneath these two core organizational constructs. Collaboration, best practices, visibility of information, a common language, and other ideas were represented in the picture’s details.

   Before they produced this picture, the organization had created plenty of PowerPoint slide packs about the new teams and the processes they would use, but the framework as a whole was not clear. In fact, some people who were supposed to benefit from this new way of working saw the change as a threat. The picture helped staff see in some detail what the future held for them. Through the facilitated dialogue, they explored the impact of the new tools and methodologies they would be given to use and the new information they would have access to. The picture sparked a conversation about how people would relate to each other in different ways. Because the discussion elicited imagined details about the future, it had a grounded quality that led participants to begin to own and desire the changes.

3. Make It Rich. Once the architecture of the picture has been decided, the facilitator and the graphic designer work together to fill in the details in the new structure. For example, to show that the balance of power needed to shift in favor of one department when dealing with suppliers, the graphic designer included two people on a see-saw. The see-saw tipped in one direction as both people looked at a computer screen showing the details of the supplier’s performance over the previous quarter. The key is to fill the picture with lots of vignettes and mini-stories that people can refer to when using the picture as a catalyst for group discussion.The picture may go through one or two iterations, as the leadership team gives its input on the details and the image takes shape.
4. Design the “Cascade” Process and Facilitators’ Guidelines. When the image is completed, it is important to plan the process for using it throughout the organization – the “cascade process” – and to develop facilitators’ guidelines. One way to use the illustration with groups is to lead a conversation by structuring a story around the picture. Another approach is to simply give an overview of the image and then look at specific areas of detail to bring out the most important messages. Classic facilitation questions include:
   • What do you imagine these people are saying to each other?
   • Which theme in this picture is most interesting/threatening/enticing/challenging/appealing to you?
   • Who would you most like to be in the picture?
   • If you could do one thing in this picture, what would it be?

   With an engaging image and a facilitator armed with some well-chosen questions, it is not too difficult to encourage some searching dialogue around core organizational issues.

5. Train Facilitators and Plan a Pilot. We have found it remarkably easy for experienced in-house facilitators and seasoned managers to use the Learning Picture to enable highly valuable conversations. The process is often given a boost if the leadership team facilitates some or all of the sessions; doing so demonstrates their own commitment to the conversation about the future.
6. Roll Out the Learning Picture and Feedback. It is important to build a process into the facilitated sessions through which employees can provide feedback to the leadership team on important aspects of the change. Leaders should approach the roll-out with the spirit of “engage and shape” rather than “tell and sell.” This tactic is particularly important when the desired future represents something of a transformation from the current state.

A Shared Mindset

The Learning Picture is one tool that leaders can use to engage employees in bringing about a desired future for their organizations. If employees have what Dave Ulrich calls a “shared mindset” about the future, then they will be more likely to realize that future. If a picture says a thousand words, then it can certainly help to create the dialogue that leads to a shared mindset. In our experience, a good picture is worth a thousand PowerPoint slides. Just ask Steven Spielberg.

Robert Bolton is associate partner at Atos Consulting, UK. He specializes in creating high performance organizations by finding, designing, and leveraging powerful connections in people processes. He can be contacted at Robert. Bolton@atosorigin.com.

The post Picture This: Using Learning Pictures to Create Shared Mindset appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Knowledge management — understood and practiced the right way — promises to make it all possible.

Not Information But Know-How

Yet something unfortunate has happened to the phrase “knowledge management.” Too many IT-bedazzled managers believe that the expression refers to the latest information-handling technology. Worse, they assume that the technology will do all the work of knowledge management for them.

Knowledge management is much more than the latest software, but beyond that caveat, it has proved difficult to define.

In Learning to Fly (Capstone Publishing, Inc., 2001), Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell maintain that knowledge management is about capturing, creating, distilling, sharing, and using not information but know-how—the internal knowledge that each member of an organization has accumulated over time and the documented knowledge the organization has compiled. And it’s not just know-how that matters — it’s also know-what, know-who, know-why, and know-when.

Imagine what might happen if we could get inside one another’s minds and tap the knowledge therein!

Arian Ward of Work Frontiers International offers the following perspective: “[Knowledge management’s] not about creating an encyclopedia that captures everything that anybody ever knew. Rather, it’s about keeping track of those who know the recipe, and nurturing the culture and the technology that will get them talking.” As Collison and Parcell point out, such definitions shift the emphasis away from the creation of vast knowledge repositories and toward strategies for increasing the mobility of the knowledge that’s inside people’s heads. That mobility enables teams, departments, and entire organizations to constantly learn, innovate, surmount new challenges, and achieve new successes. Thus true knowledge management is more about people than anything else. It entails a range of activities, all of which organizations can practice and master.

Put another way, knowledge management is about learning how we learn. Information technology may indeed be fast, powerful, and impressive, but at most it merely supports true knowledge management. Companies that fail to grasp this concept risk investing in expensive IT systems — only to suffer disappointment and unnecessary expenses when the technology proves unable to “manage knowledge” for them.

BP’s Road Map

Telling stories — of successes, failures, elation, and even despair — is among the most powerful of knowledge management tools. “Here’s what happened when I did X.” “Here’s what we learned when Y happened.” “Well, it’s settled: We’ll never do Z again!” Learning to Fly tells the story of BP’s journey toward learning how to “capture the knowledge of 100,000 of the world’s brightest people.”

But the book is more than just an interesting narration of what BP did to become a knowledge-management juggernaut. And it’s far from a brag-fest. Instead, Collison and Parcell offer it as a road map for other organizations that wish to embark on the same journey.

Two longtime knowledge management practitioners at BP, the authors not only share behind-the-scenes details from BP’s experience; they also provide a wealth of hints, tips, tools, and techniques that any company can apply. As they themselves admit, “You won’t find too much theory here.” Rather, this is a book about what the folks at BP have practiced and what they have learned from practicing it.

In addition, Collison and Parcell set out to structure the book in a way that would help readers navigate the information in it, plot their own course through it, and follow whatever line of thinking they found interesting. To that end, the authors instructed their publisher to lay out the text in ways that emulate web pages. There are links between pages to allow readers to follow their train of thought to the pages containing relevant material. Alternatively, readers can work their way through the book in the more conventional, linear manner.

Finally, the authors have liberally sprinkled “facilitator’s notes” throughout the book: advice from seasoned professionals on how to introduce knowledge-management practices into their own organization. They’ve also inserted “action zones,” in which they offer readers ideas for applying their new learning to their own situations.

Clearly, this book is meant to be manhandled, scribbled in, dog-eared, and, well, used. At its heart, however, lie two enduring truths:

1. Successful knowledge management means learning before, during, and after everything you do.

2. Successful knowledge management hinges on a company’s ability to create the kind of environment that enables people to get in touch with “those who know” and to “develop communities [of individuals] who act as guardians of the company’s knowledge.”

What follows is a sampling of the tools and techniques BP has used in service of these truths.

Learning Before: “Somebody Has Already Done It”

Learning before doing centers on what the authors call a “peer assist”: a structured, facilitated meeting or workshop with a specific purpose, to which you ask people from other teams to come and share their experiences, insights, and knowledge with your own team.

A peer assist can have one of any number of purposes, including targeting a specific technical or commercial challenge, identifying new lines of inquiry, or simply strengthening staff networks. The key, however, is to look across the company’s hierarchy — not up or down — to ensure the participants really are equals. As John Browne maintains, “People are much more open with their peers.”

How do you select participants? Look for people who will challenge your mental models and offer fresh options and new lines of inquiry. Consider people from other disciplines, businesses, and even companies. The broader range of experiences you gain access to, the more insights into your problem you’ll generate.

And how do you find these folks? Use these techniques:

• Look for people down the hall who are working on different projects.
• In a large company, use the firm’s intranet Yellow Pages.
• In a small company, look for interested and potentially valuable outsiders — a supplier, a customer, a fellow member of a professional association.
• Post an announcement well ahead of the scheduled time for your peer assist.

Learning During: “Let’s Stop and Reflect”

Learning during doing centers on holding what are normally called After Action Reviews (AARs) while you’re conducting the work process or effort in question (for more information about the AAR process, see “Emergent Learning in Action: The After Action Review” by Charles S. Parry and Marilyn Darling, V12N8). At BP, AARs consist of an open, short (20-minute), facilitated meeting during which participants answer four simple questions:

1. What was supposed to happen? 2. What actually happened? 3. Why were there differences between our intent and reality? 4. What did we learn? The keys to AARs? Hold them while all the participants are still present and their memories of the situation are fresh. And don’t forget to record the responses to the four questions, as well as any agreed-upon actions.

Learning After: “What Happened and How Will We Apply It?”

Learning after doing focuses your attention on ways to capture and (more important) transfer lessons from a project to new challenges. To do so, the authors recommend a simple, facilitated meeting that they call a “retrospect.”

More in-depth than an AAR, a retrospect is akin to conducting an analysis after a war, rather than after one of the battles. During the meeting (which should last anywhere from an hour for a simple project to two days for a complex one), you do the following:

• Revisit the objectives and deliverables of your project.
• Ask “What went well?” Then ask “Why?” several times.
• Ask “What could have gone better?” Then ask “Why?” several times.

Who should attend a retrospect? The authors recommend the project leader; key project-team members; and the customer, client, or sponsor. Most important, make sure everyone understands that the meeting’s purpose is not to assign blame or praise, but to ensure that future projects go even better than this one. See that everyone has a fair share of “airtime.”

Creating a Knowledge Management Environment

Practicing learning before, during, and after a project lies at the core of knowledge management. By building the right organizational environment, you can make these practice sessions even more potent.

As a first step, make sure everyone has the tools needed to share documents and knowledge. Then, focus on encouraging new behaviors: specifically, asking for help, listening actively, challenging one another, nurturing relationships, and building trust.

These behaviors reflect new beliefs — such as “It’s okay to request assistance” — that can create a sense of discomfort within some organizational climates. But by putting new behaviors into action, people can begin gradually reshaping even their deepest beliefs.

BP knows this first-hand — and has the success to prove it.

Lauren Keller Johnson is a freelance writer living in Lincoln, MA.

The post Capturing the Knowledge of “100,000 of the World’s Brightest People” appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

First, relax and take a deep breath. (You probably need it, if you think a stock and flow diagram is cute!) Then consider some lessons I’ve learned, as I’ve tried to advance the use of systems thinking in many different organizations over the past 15 or more years:

Lesson 1: Except in rare circumstances, don’t tell your managers that they must adopt systems thinking. Most senior managers are eminent pragmatists, focused on their goals (or the goals they’ve been given). To them, as good as it is, systems thinking is just a means to an end. Your bosses will be more likely to hear you if you help them achieve their goals than if you ask them to adopt your tools.

Listen to them, and discover what their problems and goals are in their words. Ask questions. Be curious. Don’t fake curiosity so they’ll open up; instead, really be curious (people can often tell the difference, and taking this approach also affects your levels of perception). When they’ve stated a clear problem that systems thinking can address, ask them if they’d be interested in finding a solution. Then show them the way forward, perhaps without ever mentioning the words “systems thinking.”

Your bosses will be more likely to hear you if you help them achieve their goals than if you ask them to adopt your tools.

As an analogy, think about the times you’ve called the help desk to solve a problem with your personal computer. You don’t want the technician to tell you all the gory details about the technology you’re using; you just want her to solve your problem now. That’s the way your manager will likely regard systems thinking.

If you work for an innovative manager who sees the strategic advantage in simulation, you may again be tempted to start talking about systems thinking. Careful! I had a manager like that when I was starting in organizational simulation, and the situation initially seemed great. What I forgot was that the other managers I was serving, his peers, didn’t share his enthusiasm, and I needed to work on solving their problems, not talking about my technology.

Lesson 2: Don’t do your work in a vacuum. When I first started out, I’d ask managers what their biggest problem was. They’d tell me, and then I’d head back to my desk and computer to start working on it. A week or so later, I’d drop by the managers’ offices again to get more data, only to hear that they had solved the problem two days earlier! When I would ask what they did, it was clear they had found an acceptable but often quite mediocre bandage to apply. That is, they fixed the problem well enough so that they could turn to another area of concern that was crying out for help, but they hadn’t necessarily fixed it for good.

It took me a few loops through this process before I discovered that, if I didn’t change my approach, I would always be working on a problem someone had declared was their biggest bugbear one day and that they had “solved” two days later — not a way to feel good about my contribution or to ensure my long-term job security!

If a manager presents you with a problem, work with him to solve it. Solicit the information you need while you’re sitting with him, and capture the key aspects of the situation on paper in front of him. Scribble down statements, data, and fragments of stock and flow diagrams. Accept the manager’s input about the diagram. If it’s the sort of issue and situation where it’s appropriate to pull together a group, do so and use any of the facilitation techniques created to help with such work.

You’ll probably need to do some of the more detailed modeling on your own, but don’t stray long from involving the others in giving you data or reviewing and guiding your progress. You’ll have to judge how long you can stay apart, but in most cases, you should be interacting several times a week.

To maintain that openness and pace, you’ll need to be good at modeling. If you don’t feel comfortable working in front of your managers or internal customers, and if you have to spend more time studying than doing, get some support, whether it means taking a course, bringing in outside consultants to help, or allying yourself with others in your company who can help you deliver the services your internal customers expect. You might find a consultant who will collaborate with you so that you deliver the value together while you simultaneously increase your skills.

Lesson 3: Respect the data. As I was listening to an explanation of a problem recently, I developed an intriguing hypothesis regarding the cause of the behavior being described. Back at the office, I started working on a simple model to explore that hypothesis. The harder I looked, the less I could find quantitative evidence that my theory was true. After a bit of struggle, I managed to let go of my intriguing idea, focused on the data, and ultimately discovered what I think is an even more important story.

Remember that data comes in many forms, not all of which are quantitative.

Lesson 4: Develop a knack for seeing patterns and recognizing likely underlying structures. One of the key mantras of systems thinking is that events are part of patterns, and patterns are created by structures. Most people look at events and see events. When you see a notable happening, see if it’s part of a pattern. If it is, think about the type of structure that might create such a pattern — such as exponential growth or cyclical behavior — and look at the organizational system to see if it has such a structure. Then think about modifications to the structure that might fix the recurring events. Finally, test your hypothesis by creating a simple simulation model.

This approach will help you offer effective services faster, and your managers will appreciate that you can help them solve their problems well and quickly. Of course, you get better at recognizing the structures that create specific patterns by doing lots of simulation.

Some years ago, I watched a manager talk about bouts of overspending followed by bouts of underspending. To him, it was an event of overspending that lasted several months, then a pause, then another event of several months of overspending. I saw this as a type of simple oscillation, and I began to look for a structure that could create this kind of behavior. Knowing what to look for expedited my search for a structure in the organization that could generate such a pattern. It wasn’t too far from discovering the structural problem to proposing the cure, and then testing it, submitting it for approval, and implementing it. Incidentally, out-of-control spending dropped by 95 percent when we installed the new process in the real world.

Lesson 5: Remember that systems thinking is ultimately about helping people. No matter how ironclad your model seems to be, you’re doing this to make the world (or your piece of it) better for people. Most of us don’t want to be told what to do; we prefer being involved in the process of deciding what to do. When you keep others involved and make it clear that your goal is to help them, not simply to create a technological marvel, people are more likely to provide insights you need and help the implementation succeed. Besides, it’s the right thing to do.

In the out-of-control spending case, I created a simulation model and persuaded the manager to try the approach. As we implemented the solution, we created a team that met weekly to discuss progress and to guide mid-course corrections. Even though I had created the model and implemented some necessary software, I made sure my influence was only equal to that of the others. To keep that message of equality in the forefront, we rotated responsibility for leading our meetings so no one appeared to be the de facto leader.

Involving the entire group was key to our success, for everyone involved knew that they had a say in the matter and that we’d do what worked in the real world, not just what worked in my model. Everyone, from the administrative assistants to the finance department representative to the managers, understood that this system was in place to help them do their work more effectively and to help the organization be more successful, and they knew by example that their insights could and would be adopted to further refine our process. I credit the project’s success half to the insights from modeling and half to the way we involved the people doing the work.

Lesson 6: Plan on course corrections; systems thinking doesn’t end when you’ve got a model. Your model was only a model; you’ll probably discover unforeseen problems as you implement the solution. Because models produce hard numbers, while life often seems messy, it’s sometimes tempting to hold on tightly to the lessons of the model when the two seem to diverge.

Remember that you’ve just sold your organization on the importance of a systems view and on the importance of understanding feedback. Now it’s your turn to deal with feedback — feedback from the real world. Listen, observe, and reflect, and be willing to incorporate what you learn into the implementation.

Now, take another deep breath, stand up, and go make your organization and the world better! Don’t sell systems thinking; be a systems thinker!

The post Introducing Systems Thinking into Your Organization appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Becoming a seasoned systems thinker starts with a strong commitment to developing your own awarenesses and skills.

Ask Different Questions. Systems thinking offers a framework for defining problems as well as solving them. To practice thinking from a more systemic perspective, start by paying attention to the questions you ask. Try to ask questions that get at underlying structural relationships or patterns of behavior exhibited over time; that focus your attention on potential delays, balancing or reinforcing processes, and unintended consequences; and that help you understand what time intervals you’re focusing on and how you and others are perceiving situations.

Learn to Experience Time Differently. When faced with complex problems, we are often strongly influenced by society’s messages about what constitutes enough time. Typically, we focus on shorter time intervals than we should.

To combat this, try making explicit the time horizon with which you are working. For example, are you interested in the behavior of oil prices as they move over a two-month period or a two-year period? What might be an appropriate time horizon for understanding the impact of nuclear-waste disposal?

Also, extend your sense of what constitutes “the present.” Try thinking in terms of a longer block of time as “now”—say, one year past and one year ahead. Ask yourself what was happening a year ago. What is happening now? What does the next year hold? By extending our sense of “now,” we can grasp interconnections that we may not have seen before.

Try slowing down so that you can align more effectively with the systems you are trying to understand. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge observes that “learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic.” Take a walk outside. Sit under a tree for 20 minutes. Shadows will move. A leaf may fall. See what you can observe by slowing down.

Notice the Systems Around You. Try looking for feedback loops in everyday situations. For example, has your company launched a new product whose sales really took off, only to plateau out eventually? This may indicate a reinforcing process that suddenly is affected by a balancing process. Are you feeling pulled like a yo-yo between two extremes? If so, there is likely a balancing loop at work.

Keep an eye out for signs of systemic processes in your personal life as well, such as the impact your actions have on your family system or natural cycles. Might a reinforcing loop be broken if you picked your socks up off the floor? What might happen if you—and others—turned off the water while brushing your teeth?

Draw a Loop-a-Day (or one a week). Every morning, sit down with your cup of coffee, the newspaper, a pad of paper, and a pen, and look for news stories that you can explore through causal loop diagrams. Search for stories that describe patterns of behavior over time. (For example, “The unemployment rate rose over the past 10 years, as did the number of families seeking welfare assistance.”) Sketch the systemic structure that you think is producing those patterns. This is a great way to practice recognizing systemic structures and mastering causal loop diagramming. The Economist magazine is a particularly rich source of systems-oriented stories.

Collaborative Learning

For many people, real insights come in the company of others. Likewise, the use of systems thinking concepts and tools is most powerful in a group or team

Find a Coach or Mentor. Establish an apprenticeship with a seasoned systems thinker. Shadow that person during part of a workday or a consulting engagement. Or, identify a systems thinking coach or mentor. Pick one example a week from your daily coffee-and-causal-loop exercise and fax or e-mail the article and your diagram to your mentor. Discuss the loops and consider alternative explanations, key questions, data you’d want to collect, and possible interventions.

Start a Book Group. Find a partner or group with whom you can connect on a regular basis to read an article or book related to systems thinking or organizational learning. Read a chapter or article a week and then discuss it (in person or by phone or e-mail). Or, convene a group to try exercises in experientially based books such as The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Systems Thinking Basics, The Dance of Change, or The Systems Thinking Playbook.

Form Learning Communities. Gather with others who are interested in systems thinking, either in person or on-line. If you live near people interested in building their systems thinking skills, try meeting once a month. Have members bring stories from their business experiences, and select one to discuss as a group. Explore the roots of the problem through inquiry and causal loop diagramming.

This article is an update of some of the material in “Life-Long Systems Thinking Practice” by Linda Booth Sweeney, The Systems Thinker V7N8.

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