What animation can teach us about systems thinking

The history of animation is an excellent example of #systemsthinking.

In a given studio, talented artists would draw thousands of individual, still drawings. Photographers would take pictures of each one, and then the engineers would stitch all of those photos together in a long sequence they would make into a film. When played back at a certain speed, it looked like live action.

In the excellent audiobook, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (Chapter 19 at around the 13-minute mark), the author describes how even after #MickeyMouse had become a phenomenal success, Walt was still continually dissatisfied with the quality of the animations they were turning out.

It wasn't until Walt commissioned an animation of a fish in 1930 that they they had their breakthrough. The fish was in constant motion in a moving stream, was never static, and really seemed to be alive.

They then compared that to their typical animations and realized how an animated character might do a lively walk, stop, and then the only movement might be the eyes blinking or the head turning while the body stayed absolutely cemented in place. These "body is frozen" moments are when the illusion of animation dropped away and as Walt put it, "Your character goes dead, and it looks like a drawing."

This was a turning point not just for the #Disney Studio, but for the field of #animation in general.

Up until this point, the technique was what the author called "making tight drawings," going from pose-to-pose, with very few "in betweens" between poses. The focus was on clean pose, clean pose, clean pose. Even when sped up, it still looked like parts being strung together versus one, continuous flow of movement.

After this realization, Walt's focus immediately turned to trying to get his artists to think differently about animation. He wanted them to think of capturing the fluidity and second-by-second, nuanced movements of the overall action the character was taking. In other words, he was asking them to change their focus from from a #partsparadigm, to thinking about the whole.

The same is true for us as leaders.

We need to keep the big system in mind and always be the voice reinforcing the overall mission--the real end product we are there to produce.

We need to learn how to see the system's constraint, so we know where to focus our limited resources.

We need to stop what Dr. #Goldratt (the founder of the #TheoryofConstraints) called #localoptimization where we become fixated on improving our shop (focused on drawing perfect, tight poses where the overall action or the in-between drawings don't matter that much), to being focused on what is best for the system.

The goal is not to simply improve the parts (which often becomes the focus of those who see their role as #processimprovement). The goal is to deliver the promised value to the primary customer, and we only have a fighting change of doing that when we stay focused on creating, nurturing, and improving a system that is specifically designed for that purpose.

We need to continually remind ourselves that a system is more than its parts just like an animation is more than a series of poses. The "connective tissue" between the parts, the interactions, the hand-offs, the interfaces, the API's, are all parts in their own right.