Beyond The Blueprint - Issue #1

Welcome to the first edition of Beyond The Blueprint. I am excited to share my thoughts, ideas and perspectives about the latest trends around the world with a personal touch. I?hope you find some enjoyment and new insights while reading through these pages.?

In this issue we will be taking a look at limiting beliefs.

This is something often talked about in personal development as to how they influence every aspect of our life. People phrase it differently using a number of other terms, perhaps as self-doubt or self-defeating thoughts.

But what is it?

A limiting belief is a meticulously crafted message that you subconsciously use to convince yourself that you are lesser than what you truly are. This message puts limitations on what you can do or become.

When someone says, “I’m not good at that” or “I’m too old for this,” they are expressing a typical limiting belief about themselves.

Another way people express limiting beliefs is by associating them with external factors. For instance, if you refrain from doing something, you may believe it prevents inconvenience or benefits someone else.

But the truth is – some of them are merely perceptions, not facts, and they come with a lot of bias that is driven by the fear of taking action.

It is about these perceptions we are going to talk about today. But not only in the way it applies to our personal lives, but also about how the limitedness in thinking affect reaching our true potential in value chains and in managing resources.

Putting limiting beliefs to what you are afraid of changing?

What a limiting belief puts on you are restrictions or boundaries.

In systems thinking, we call these constraints.

Constraints impose limits on the extent of changes that can be introduced to a system. Hence the improvements are also limited and often provide suboptimal outcomes. To go beyond, you got to be expansive to consider a larger system boundary, so that you open up for more possibilities.

Same applies to a lot of other smaller sub systems

There are many examples of this from supply chain management to mathematics.

In supply chain management, when we have set boundaries for supplier’s operations separately, we wait for orders to arrive at our gates sourced from the supplier. With the tendency for everyone to keep buffers, safety stocks, and to allow for lead times and margins within their own boundary, we get amplified variations – leading to phenomena like the bull-whip effect.

We could expand our boundary to include the supplier, introducing techniques like vendor-managed inventory. Here our stock level depletion is transparent to the supplier, giving them the ability to fulfil orders considering an optimal outcome for both parties. By expanding the boundaries we traditionally confine ourselves to, we unlock our potential and open up possibilities to start performing at a higher level achieving what wasn’t possible initially.

Enlarging the system that we influence

This is the type of thing we can apply when we think of a regenerative (circular) economy.

Rather than being limited by what we receive after consumption (waste as we call it), we decide to influence the preceding system that generates it (we design differently).

The outcome is real – as we now start getting useful co-products as reusable resources, instead of waste.

We realise that the more whole the system is that we choose to influence (upstream and downstream of the value chain) and more purposeful the changes are (co-exist and design with nature), the greater and powerful the outcomes are.

We’ve shifted the possibilities of what could be achieved to a level which could not imagine before….