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As children, we learned that our parents had ‘the answers’. As students we expected our teachers had.
When we enter an organization, we assume that “the boss” must have the answers.
We are convinced deep down that people above us know the answers, or at least they ought to know if they are competent.
From a very early age, we are taught to break problems apart, to de-fragment the world for simpler pieces. Apparently, this makes complex tasks and subjects manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price: we can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.
Furthermore, when we try to “see the bigger picture”, we try to re-assemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces.
Human systems are infinitively complex. Science produces overwhelming evidences that human beings have “cognitive limitations”, that “you can never figure it out”. Cognitive scientists have shown that we can deal only with a very small number of separate variables simultaneously.
But then how can you explain driving an automobile at sixty miles per hour in heavy traffic, or playing a Mozart sonata? Those tasks are enormously complex, involving hundreds of variables and rapid changes that must be recognized and immediately responded to. Moreover, they are accomplished with little or no “conscious attention”: we drive through traffic while carrying on a conversation with a person next to us. The concert pianist thinks only of the aesthetics of the performance, not the mechanics.
There are two types of complexity – the “detailed complexity” of many variables (as described above) and the “dynamic complexity” when “cause and effect” are not close in time and space and obvious interventions do not produce expected outcomes.
It is extremely awkward in normal verbal language to describe “dynamic complexities” that produce interdependent, circular processes.
Try to explain the entire circular process of filling a glass with water according to a level of your thirst.
You might think: “That’s not a system – it’s too simple”. From the linear point of view, we say: “I am filling a glass of water”.
When we think deeper, when we begin seeing some contours of a system, we are overwhelmed by complexity; we give up and just say: “A caused B, which caused C”. But this is simply a convenient shortcut that suggests a linear thought that “A did cause B”. Subconsciously, we tend to forget that “B also caused A”. Simply because if there were no B, A would not have done any cause B.
If all we have is linear language, then we think in linear ways, and we perceive the world linearly – that is, as a chain of events, not as a system of “cause and effect”.
Our non-systemic ways of thinking are so damaging specifically because they consistently lead us to focus on low-leverage changes: we focus on symptoms where the stress is greatest. We repair or ameliorate the symptoms. But such efforts only make matters better in the short run, at best, and worse in the long run.
It’s hard to disagree with the principle of leverage. But the leverage in most real-life systems, such as in most organizations, is not obvious to most of the actors in those actions. They don’t see the “structures” underlying their actions.
If we begin to master a systemic language, all this starts to change. The subconscious is subtly retrained to structure data in circles instead of straight lines.
We find that we “see” response processes and system archetypes everywhere.
To be continued...
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