John Latham of the Organization Design Studio discussed his thoughts about the importance of systems thinking and I added an excerpt from a recent podcast with another guest.
John Latham: I have not added anything to the periodic table of organization thought. All these pieces are somewhere else? What I’ve done is organized them, talked about relationships, talked about the application of them and put them into based on what was common to the CEOs, chose some and left others out. But everything has a history. I mean you just look at on the product of all these other people’s thinking over the years, and I’m just taking next steps, the next small steps.
Everything I’m talking about is in it, but if there’s one thread if you said, John, you can only choose one thread to keep, because that’s all we have on the starship enterprise and we’re leaving down, I would choose the systems thread because, without that, there’s really nothing to talk about. Everything else, it’s a collection of ideas. Without a systems understanding in some way, process systems, without flow, there’s really nothing to talk about. Yeah, those are some great materials, and I’ve even done I think modeling which is a computer modeling of systems, so I’ve even done some of that, and I had a great time. I could never get that into a time zone that was acceptable to sell. In other words, nobody would pay for that.
Joe: Systems thinking is great. All the archetypes are great, and they’re great to draw, and I practice with them. John Shipley told me the way he learned it when he was at LL Bean is he walked around with like flashcards and drawing them out, and it took him like a year and a half. I said that’s exactly how I learned them. We were laughing about it and going on, and it was so funny because I said, but the problem is, you could never monetize it.
Excerpt from the Shipley podcast: The Practical Application of Systems Thinking
I asked John Shipley about the usefulness of Systems Thinking in the podcast and I encourage you to listen to it. But after the podcast, he added some thoughts about why people struggle with Systems Thinking as a discipline.
John Shibley: I was thinking about another answer to your question about why I didn’t take… I was looking at Steve Jobs was evaluating Dropbox, and he said, Dropbox isn’t a program, it’s a feature’ which I just think is such an interesting insight. It’s not a product; it’s a feature. I think that for the people who brought system dynamics into the mainstream world, systems thinking was a product. They are departments. In the academic world, it is a product. There are departments dedicated to show people how to do it. But in the world of application, it’s a feature.
It needs to be embedded in an overall process that helps people get stuff done and that never happens. You learn that business people want to get stuff done and that’s what you really should be focusing on is helping them get done the things they want to get done. I think one of the things; Dr. Deming was really into helping people get results, and so much of that work is by helping people understand what’s going on, beginning with statistical process control. What is going on with this manufacturing process? How do I understand it and how do I change it to get the thing I want to have happened? Having it really straight forward approach and that missing from it. It’s too bad.