What Is Systems Thinking, and Why Should You Care?

When you have a problem with someone at work - perhaps an employee or a boss - what is your process for solving it?

Very often, we tend to think of problems at work as “people” problems, and we aim to figure out who is responsible for the problem, then try to “fix” it by fixing the person.

Ross Arnold has been a systems engineer for the United States Department of Defense (DOD) for 20 years, and he says this is often the wrong approach. Instead, it’s more productive to think of problems from a systems thinking perspective.

What is systems thinking?

There aren’t many problems bigger than the sorts of problems the DOD faces. With a budget of hundreds of billions of US dollars and responsibility for maintaining peace and arbitrating conflict around the world, everything the DOD does has far-reaching consequences.

Arnold says that he took an interest in systems thinking as a necessary approach to helping solve these massively complex problems in a holistic way. Eventually, he took a PhD in systems thinking in order to better serve his role in the effort, and wrote a foundational paper that is still the most-referenced resource for understanding what systems thinking is and how to assess it.

He says that the question, “What is systems thinking?” was exactly what he wanted to define with that paper. There are a thousand definitions available online, but until his paper, none that clearly and conclusively defined it in a useful and actionable way.

“I describe it as a way to understand systems,” he says. “It’s a set of analytic skills that help you understand systems and make them do what you want.”

Although Arnold’s background is in software, he’s quick to add that “systems” doesn’t only refer to technical systems. Any set of interrelated data and phenomena can be a system. For instance, a relationship is a system. So is the economy, a hospital, a school, etc.

“So systems thinking is the ability to recognize these systems,” says Arnold, “and understand how they work and make changes so that they do what you want them to do.”

To understand systems thinking, you have to change your mindset

Systems thinking requires a mindset of openness and willingness to see things from other perspectives. A system necessarily involves a complex set of problems and interrelationships, as well as multiple points of view. In order to think holistically about a system, you have to be willing to get outside your own perspective.

“Imagine someone you really disagree with,” says Arnold. “There’s still value in exploring their perspective. How did they get there, why do they believe what they believe?”

Additionally, you have to approach with the mindset that complex problems involve more than one direct cause and effect.

“Many things have indirect causes and effects, and many root causes for each phenomenon,” says Arnold. “If you look at it as one problem with one cause, you’re not going to get very far.”

The systems thinking mindset also is about looking for connections, and thinking about how things influence each other.

Relationships are a type of system

Arnold says that systems thinking impacts everything he does, including personal relationships. That’s because relationships are a system.

For instance, in the boss/employee relationship, you have a certain amount of trust or personal capital. You can build trust by being kind, having drinks together, and doing what you say you’re going to do, for example. There are many factors and feedback loops that impact the level of trust in the system. That trust can be “spent,” “saved,” and “grown” through your personal effort as well as external factors that may be out of your control.

This is true for the salesperson/buyer relationship as well, and thinking of it in a systems framework can help salespeople do a better job of communicating and building healthier relationships.

Always ask the question: Why?

To get better at systems thinking, Arnold says one of the biggest skills is asking the question, “Why?”

“Keep an open mind with the why - don’t assume you already know,” he says. “Remove your emotion. You can be upset, but you have to get past that to ask why something happened. What actually happened, what external factors were involved, what did you contribute?”

Keep following the chain of “why” to start understanding how the system operates. Perhaps your boss had a fight with her spouse that morning and that was one of the inputs to why she chewed you out. Maybe traffic was bad. Maybe something you said yesterday impacted her perspective of you. When you understand all the possible inputs, you can begin to solve the problem in a systems thinking way.

The one thing you CAN’T do in systems thinking

One of the big things that people have to learn NOT to do in order to activate the benefits of systems thinking is blaming.

“Most of the time it’s not the person but the system that causes a problem,” says Arnold. “You can take the person out and swap someone else in and the system will still operate the same way.”

When you blame - whether you’re blaming your boss or your employee or a coworker or your spouse, you poison the relationship. No one wants to talk to you, tell you things, or admit failure for fear of being blamed.

Systems thinking requires you to let go of blame and look for causes. Is there a training deficiency, a motivational deficiency, something wrong in the home environment or in the workplace environment? What are the indirect causes and connections that impact the system that lead to this failure?

Systems thinking can improve individual performance

“About six years ago, I was pulled into a big defense engineering project, and I was responsible for leading the engineering team,” says Arnold. “It was a multi-disciplinary team all over the country, and I was just beginning my systems thinking work.”

He says that systems thinking helped him think about how the team would work as a system, and to pay attention to every aspect of the environment and the structure of the system to optimize it, even down to who sits next to whom and how the lines of communication operate.

This helped ensure successful feedback loops and a sense of motivation.

By looking at all the “whys” in the system, he was able to become very clear and communicate very clearly about the mission and the goal.

“People self-organize when they know the goal,” he says. “People like to know that what they’re doing is valuable to the goal.”

Speaking with Arnold has made me think more about how we need to organize our teams and businesses as systems to support success. There was plenty more good insight and wisdom in our conversation, which you can watch here.

I’m curious to know what you think about systems thinking. Is this a useful lens for managing sales and sales teams? How are you applying systems thinking in your organization? Feel free to reach out to discuss how Membrain can help you take theory to practice.