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Everything is connected
Systems thinking motivates people to change because they discover their role in exacerbating the problems they want to solve.
Systems thinking catalyzes collaboration because people learn how they collectively create the unsatisfying results they experience.
Systems thinking focuses people to work on a few key coordinated changes over time to achieve system wide impacts that are significant and sustainable.
Systems thinking stimulates continuous learning, which is an essential characteristic of any meaningful change in complex systems.
Systems thinking supports four conditions for Collective Impact:
developing mutually reinforcing activities,
building a common agenda,
determining shared measurement, and
nurturing continuous communication.
SEEING THE BIG PICTURE
SEEING THE BIG PICTURE
The ancient Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant illustrates the challenge of enabling diverse stakeholders to see the big picture.
Each party touches a different part of the elephant and tends to assume that what they experience is the elephant instead of just one part of a more complex reality.
People tend to see reality in terms of what they are doing well, are rewarded for doing, and could do better if they had more resources.
On the other hand, people either fail to appreciate or question the value of others’ contributions.
In addition, they often do not have the tools to see a more complex world and understand how their intentions, thinking, and actions interact with those of other stakeholders.
UNDERSTANDING THE DEEPER SYSTEM STRUCTURE
UNDERSTANDING THE DEEPER SYSTEM STRUCTURE
The iceberg distinguishes the events level from the pattern of behavior or trend that links many events over time, and then goes deeper to expose the underlying systems structure.
The hidden 90 percent of the iceberg that causes the most damage because it shapes the trends and events.
Systems structure includes tangible elements such as the pressures, policies, and power dynamics that shape performance.
It also includes intangible forces such as perceptions (what people believe or assume to be true about the system) and purpose (the actual versus espoused intentions that drive people’s behavior).
The deeper people’s level of insight, the greater their opportunity to change the way the system behaves.
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