The Power of System Level Thinking

System level thinking enables us to build strong and innovative products and dynamic organization that cater to a wide range of people. Our capability to think on a global scale in any context enables us to build truly enriching life experiences. The most successful products are ones that are easiest to use and operate. These are also the products whose individual systems have meshed seamlessly with each of the other sub-systems. This is especially true whether we think about our work organizations or products we build. Innovative product or successful organizations cannot be built through incremental single system point of view.  

There is a story of 6 blind men, who encountered an elephant. Each of the 6 people tried to relate elephant from a different perspective based on what they experienced locally. For example the person who touched the elephant's leg, thought it to be a pillar, while the person who touched the horn thought that the elephant is a spear. Each was right in their local area where they stood through the knowledge they possessed but they was not the right answers. In this story a eventually a person would combine different elements together to create the picture of an elephant. The moral of this story was the challenge of thinking in local space. This story demonstrates the need to think from a system level, where we are combining different areas of viewpoint. 

Each day we spend considerable number of hours thinking of building the best path forward in the area of our expertise. While this works great in our day to day work, our efficiency would increase many fold when we think and start looking from the 50,000 foot perspective rather than ground level. What this enables us to do is to have a bird's eye view of the problem and also be able to look at the surrounding areas. This often is overlooked in our day to day life and work.

How can we have the mentality of having both 50,000 foot view as well as 5000 foot view? Could we define few elements in our life and work that would enable us to think globally and build locally a fruitful and successful life and work.