Systems thinking is a super power

In the world of innovation and strategy one skill that is wildly practically useful for the strategy practitioner is systems thinking.

Systems thinking is a worldview which is quite different to the way in which most experts see reality. It's not that systems thinkers don't regard specialist knowledge as valuable, instead they think broader and deeper about how problems are connected to other phenomenon that may be an enabler or disabler of their power.

Some people are natural systems thinkers, but most of us have had the ability educated out of us thanks to our professional training and knowledge development.

When we first discovered that this kind of thinking approach was in fact a recognised discipline with theory and methodologies back in January 2016, it was as if our entire earthly existence up until that moment was instantaneously compressed into a sliver of a moment and rerun in its entirety from the start through a different set of eyes. An audible chime went off and we could feel the blood drain from our face as it dawned on us that there was indeed value in 'this kind of madness'.

Systems thinking is a super power for strategists because it's a way of holistically seeing non-linear phenomena in the world that looks at the behaviour of systems over extended periods of time to try to make better sense of them and how they might be improved to produce more of what is desired and less of what isn't. An organisation is a complex adaptive system, so if you are wanting to improve its performance a better way to try to understand how to do that is through a systems thinking lens rather than attempting to optimise the parts individually thanks to a typical reductionist approach.

Too much 'strategy work' is produced without the deliberate use of systems thinking, which results in something that we like to call strategy pageantry (logical reasoning that sounds nice on the surface but has very little hope of positively affecting the future trajectory of an organisation).

Strategy itself then gets labelled as ineffective, but its not strategy that's the problem - it's how strategy gets done that is the real issue. Most executives are ignorant about what good strategy actually looks like (as well as what the rigorous process is to produce it) and are just happy to have the box ticked.

For those organisations that do take the future of their entities seriously; there's systems thinking as a beacon on the horizon to be strived towards.