1. GET THE BEAT.

It is October 11, 2001 and I can't get the beat.

I am in the Newark, NJ Poison Control Center trying to do an ethnographic study.

The New York area is raw and wounded and sobbing and rhythms are broken everywhere. The anthrax letters, which will eventually kill 5 and injure 17, are in the news. And there is a box labelled in messy crooked marker that looks like it’s been rolled in mud under a truck sitting on the desk next to me. It does not tick or jiggle, but it is scary-looking.

Step One, said Dana Meadows, of understanding a system:

Get the beat.

“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”

Normally, I can do this. I can sit quietly and watch conversations happen and see how a workplace moves. I can sit in the corners of ICUs and ERs and factories and conference rooms and fire stations and just let the beat happen, noticing all the things, picking up on how processes happen and psychological safety shifts, seeing where the social nodes are, where the power lies, how the culture is expressed, where the trust is.

But this day, there is 9/11 and anthrax and that messed-up box.

“Ignore it,” the center director tells me firmly, “We’ve called the bomb squad. They’re on the way.” Oh good. Ok then.

I take a deep breath and I look around. And I get humble. And I get the beat.

It had been there all along, of course. Because while the scary box and the disrhythm that is New York a month after 9/11 is disrupting me, it is not disrupting the sanctity of the Newark Poison Control Center and its staff.

They are swift and calm and cheerful and intelligent, taking frantic call after frantic call. They are a flowing river of life-saving, and that box isn’t getting in their way, it is just getting in mine.

Finally, I can really hear them. Talking to the sobbing mom of a baby who’s swallowed some sudafed, the wife of a man who’s gotten battery acid on his arm, the owner of a dog who’s eaten an ant trap.

The beat of this room is fast, heartbeat fast, but also deep and so so calm. It’s not the frantic tapping you’d think it would be. The director moves through like a dancer, checking on everyone, making sure people have the resources they need. Every once in a while, a call comes through that is clearly someone else’s expertise, and there’s a shout and a handoff, like a ball tossed gently across a park. Sometimes after a hard session, there is a deep sigh and a pause. Then the beat goes on.

__________________________

Every system has a beat already. And before we go changing it, introducing our new cymbals or electronic drum machine or whatever we are sure will make it better, we need to take a minute, set our own and the world’s noise aside, and get the beat. It is worth the time to get this foundation in place. It is worth the silence and the stillness it takes to get the beat before we change it up.

This is systems thinking.

*The box turned out to be supplies from some other center, labelled and packaged by the kid of an employee who needed a task so she too would not disturb the beat.