2. Listen to the Wisdom of the System

"Your software takes so long to print I get a cup of coffee while I wait," said the nurse in the ER. And then she grinned.

Silly me, thinking this was a bad thing. For her, a nurse in a hectic ER at a busy city hospital, this was a perk of using our tool.

"Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Don't be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system's own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there."

Systems self-maintain. They find ways to adapt to tough circumstances and those ways don't look like you think they should from the outside. They heal themselves, and the places where the scabs form are sometimes the strongest points. This nurse was run ragged and she needed coffee and a flaw in our software gave her one. When we redesigned it to be faster and taken that break away, we had to be really careful about how we changed it.

• How many times do we come in as solution providers and don't check where the scabs are before we start scrapping things clean?
• How many times do we take away something that is important, something people are really proud of or sentimental about, something they worked hard on?
• How many times do we stomp on, remove, or paper over something that was put in place for really good reasons we don't understand from our vantage point?

Inevitably, change upsets some of these existing capacities, but paying attention to what's already there is important to how we change things, how we talk about the changes, and how we make decisions and prioritize options.

One way to get at the options is through the process of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry is a collaborative and strengths-based approach to change. A trained AI practitioner (why yes, I am, thanks for asking) conducts an inquiry that would include understanding the strengths that exist already, hearing the stories about what is strong and successful about what they have in place.

See Part 1 of the Systems Thinking articles: 1. Get The Beat