System Thinkers Workout: How to Train Your System Awareness Muscles

Being a System Thinker is a fundamental trait for a leader.

As a System Thinker leader, you ensure that vision is linked to strategy and that strategy translates into system design.?

Systems Thinkers think and act from a whole system perspective, they are capable of making decisions in light of the long-term health of the whole system.

If you are a System Thinker, you always consider the long-term cause and effect relationship between the organisation and the environment. This involves examining how various elements within the organisation, such as resource acquisition, technology, structure, and culture, interact with one another and with the external environment to produce outcomes.

Reality check

That is all nice and cool, but how do you build this capacity? How can you develop an ability to think in systems and most importantly, how do you ensure that your people can effectively train their ability to see the big picture?

A way to train one’s ability to get system awareness is to familiarise with the system, for instance with a System Simulation.

What is a System Simulation?

A System Simulation is a model that captures system dynamics.?

Of course a model is never a complete representation of reality; reality is very complex and a model is just a simplification of reality.

Yet models are useful as they stimulate people to explore the “what ifs” of reality and ask the right questions.?

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” George Box, British statistician

How are models useful then?

To begin with, a model singles out the aspects related to a problem you want to tackle. Let’s take a look at a practical example.

First thing first: What problem do we want to solve?

Here’s a very practical and common problem in the service industry:?

How to ensure a specific service level and how does headcount influence it.

Let’s assume that you are leading a Service department. Your customers are complaining that they are experiencing a drop in service levels. You have 20 vacancies in your 1000 people organisation.

Here’s your dilemma: how do you ensure the right level of Service while keeping your headcount budget in compliance?

Next: Isolate causal factors

Now let’s ask ourselves: what aspects / factors of service headcount are influencing the Service Level??

Here are a few:

• Long time to hire someone
• Time for onboarding and training
• People leaving the organisation
• …

I have prepared a simple model to simulate 12 months of operation, linking the variables with simple formulas (e.g.: headcount = previous headcount + new hires - people leaving, …).?

Link to the model is below.

With some more time we could link in the model more factors, and with real world data we could also calibrate the model to reduce the error between the model and reality. But this will do for the sake of the exercise.

First reflections

By looking at the outcome of the baseline run of the simulation, the first considerations are:

• Headcount never reaches the target throughout the year, as the reinforcing loop (hiring) is slower as compared to the balancing loop (people leaving)
• As you never reach the desired headcount target throughout the year, you cannot support the designed service level effectively (ratio of people per installed units is always below the intended level, in this case I assumed 1 person every 10 installed units).
• The drop in service level (as measured by the change in the people to installed base ratio) is quite significant (even greater than 10%).

One way to react could be to open more vacancies than it is needed, that means, you preemptively open positions for people that have not left yet: this could bring you closer to the headcount target at the end of the fiscal year and could lift up the service level.?

But it is a risky game: what if people don’t leave?

We could go on for a while, making other changes and observing how the model reacts.

The main point I want to make is:

when we are in front of a model and we can act on it, we ask the right questions and we get prepared for the “what ifs” of life.

This is a way to build your system awareness muscles.

Do you want to give it a try?

If you are in the mood for geeking out, I prepared an interactive simulation game for the problem described in this article.

It’s completely open (no log in), feel free to play with it and let me know your considerations in the comments!?

Also, this model is very simplistic, what other parameters would you include to make it closer to reality?

Give it a go: Simulation link

Thanks and happy geeking out!

For further reading / watching

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

Thinking in Systems: by Donella Meadows