Strategy for Life

Most people have not created a strategy for life. It is easy to live day after day, doing things you have always done without a plan. It is time for you to create your plan. The majority of this text follows Rich Horwath´s book ”Strategy for you”. The key difference is that this strategy focuses on systems.

Lets begin from the end. Do this step alone. It is crucial to not let anyone affect it. Imagine your state of being after you have executed your strategy. Define what you want to be in terms of the four key components: mind, body, spirit, and relationships. Ask: ”What do they mean to you?” Think about your values related to these terms. For example, if you value freedom, the state of being signifies to be free. If you value health, the state of being is to be healthy, etc. Think about what your ideal life will look after you have achieved these states. Do not hold back. It is not a time to think about your chances to get the life you want. Reality checks will come later. The purpose is to start from the fundamentals.

If you cannot define what you want in terms of your values, think about the past. It is the best indicator in your deepest desires of the future state of being. What excited you then? Who was involved? After you have thought about the past, ask: ”What are things that feel great today regarding body, mind, spirit, and relationships?” If you do not know, keep a notebook or smartphone with you all the time. Write things that feel great. Eventually, you can notice and define your wanted states of being. These states are part of your strategic intent.

The next step is to define uniqueness. Find out the special understanding, skills, and personality traits you have. The best way to do this is to ask others. Ask friends and seek professional help if you can. Your ego is the worst enemy to discover why you are special. Therefore, you are not the best judge of uniqueness. Ask about the past and the present. Do the former if someone has known you for decades. Ask about your body, mind, spirit, and relationships. Ask what are different about them? Can others define your distinct style to express yourself? Your uniqueness has two components. You can have a special style to express similar actions as others or you can have special actions.

Resource allocation

It is time to focus on your resources. Lets get back to the four key components and think about the resources you allocate to them. They include time, talent, and financial assets. I will focus on time now. Once you have used it, you will never get it back. Time allocation is one of the most important tasks. If you have never found out how much time you use in a week for each action, it is time to do it.

Measure categories like sleep, work, exercise, learning, commute, relationships and parenting, spirituality, eating or preparing meals, other chores, TV, radio, and social media. There are 168 hours in the week. Finding out 150+ hours of them is enough. If you had a minute-by-minute schedule, you wasted lots of time. You could not say ”no” well enough. The highest odds are causes related to work. Modern knowledge workers are the prime examples.

Think about your major systems related to the four components and resources. Do you have any? It is likely that you have them but have not thought of them as systems. Think about their structures in terms of goals, feedback loops, interactions, etc. Anything from one to five main systems in each category is a reasonable number. Systems can interconnect many categories. Finally, think about how your major systems support the state of being you want to achieve. For example, if you want to be free, think about the systems that create your income streams. Single stream is not enough, unless you have enough money to last for decades.

SWOT analysis

A good source for the principles of SWOT-analysis is Albert Humphrey´s article in businessballs.com. Strengths and weaknesses are internal abilities. Opportunities and threats are external situations. The first two describe something you have and the second two are about future situations. Together they form a useful model to design a strategy. I prefer potential edges instead of strengths. Edges are the unique combinations of your talents. They create faster learning and higher peak potential. Weaknesses bring constraints. They complicate and slow chances to go where you want to be. Opportunities are beneficial and can help you increase odds to reach the wanted states of being. Threats have the potential to reduce odds to reach the wanted states.

You can have control over internal abilities. They include resources, understanding, internal systems, relationships, values, etc. Make shortlists of the edges with the highest potential and greatest weaknesses. Be concise, specific, and focus on causes, not results. For example, my live interactions with others are poor because I am shy.

You can influence opportunities and threats, but not control them. They include the actions of others, the supply and demand of your skills, economic situations, technological changes, etc. Quantify the odds of future situations and their expected payoffs when you list your opportunities and threats. Do not be specific. Use ranges. Think about the possible impact they have in reaching your states of being. Choose the ones with the largest effects. Deal with them in strategy. Use discovered uniqueness, resource allocation, and SWOT-analysis to create strategic visions for each component of life before you design your strategy.

Design and execution

After creating strategic visions, design strategies in terms of four key components of life. Define the current state, what you want to become, objectives, allocated resources, and vision to each strategy. Involve all stakeholders in each step. Without their approval, it is impossible to design strategies you can execute.

Start from the smallest difference between the desired result and the current situation to design the first strategy. It requires the least effort and has the highest odds of success. It creates inertia and helps you to move forward. Start from it and finish with the strategy that requires the hardest effort. Do not forget the time frames. They take years to execute. A complete change in some state of being can take up to ten years.

Objectives are a big part of the design. They focus on systems and their structures. This perspective is important because visions change. What you want today might change in a few years. Great systems can work with different states of being. The first objectives you design are crucial. Focus on new and simple systems with short time frames. Objectives with the longest time frames and highest complexity become later. After designing the first objectives, make a what-to-change list. Think about whether you have to add resources to the items in the second. A not-to have-list becomes last. It has all systems and system structures that create obstacles to execute strategies.

Each design must have a vision, current and desired states, resource allocation, objectives in the executing order, what-to-change and not-to-have lists, and time frames for execution. Most parts change during the execution. Time frames have the highest odds of change. Most people are too optimistic about them. The longer the frames and the more complex the objectives, the larger the changes. No strategy survives the whole execution. Be flexible, willing to eliminate, and change parts of the strategy when you have to.

Do not hide strategies from senses. They are hard to execute without availability. Execution also requires tactics. They are specific instructions on how you implement strategies. They are beyond this text.

Personal systems you need

First I would like to say that this text is the last one during this year. It will be a short one.

The quality of your life depends on the quality of your systems. The problem with this fact is that you have tens or even hundreds of systems. Most of them do not even recognize. All your habits are systems. All your other behavioral routines are systems. What separates the other behavioral routines from habits is that they do not have clue-routine-reward order. Their electronic ”fingerprint” in your brain is not the same. Your life also depends on systems other people built like companies. In this text, I will focus on the personal systems you need. I will have a list of them, but I do not explain it to them very much. Most of them are self-explanatory and even obvious. Some of them you do not recognize as systems and some of them should be systems but are not in your daily use.

Let's start with the most obvious ones. You need to have systems to get enough sleep, to have high-quality nutrition, to have enough exercise, and to recover from your daily efforts at work or from the efforts in learning new things. You also need to have systems to use your hours as efficiently as possible, like using your best hours of the day in the most important things. You need to have systems for moving from one place to another, no matter what they are. As you can see, these things are not rocket science.

You need habits. You also need to have systems to change your habits and create new ones. Everyone has bad habits and you can only change them. Therefore, the former is harder than the latter. This means that they take more time and effort.

You need decision-making systems. You need to have decision-making systems for less and more important decisions. For example, you can have different systems for making decisions about small amounts of money and a large amount of money. You can also have different systems for intuitive tasks and deliberate ones.

You need to have practice systems to improve your understanding and skills in any endeavor you want to be better. One system is deliberate practice. It does not work in all skills. You need to have systems to maintain your edges in skills that are better than your competitors. You also need to have support systems to deal with your weaknesses and blind spots. You need a system that either destroys or confirms your strongest beliefs. This system has to focus on reality, not things that you believe are true. You need a system that produces constructive criticism. You may also need separate systems that measure the results of your actions and decisions. This system has to separate skill from luck or randomness.

You have to build strategies to get what you want from life. They are systems like the rest of the mentioned things. They have also subsystems but let's not get into them. You also need back up systems in the most important things.

I will update this list later.

Merry Christmas and happy new year!

-TT

Systems Thinking

This text is about introducing you to systems thinking. It continues from what you have learned about systems, feedback loops, and interconnections. Please check the previous links if you are not familiar with these themes before reading this text. This text gives you the rude basics of systems thinking.

You live in a complex world with lots of interactions between systems and their elements. It is hard to understand the world without systems thinking. It can be described as a typical mindset. It is used to get a big picture of your systems and how their elements produce different cause-effect relationships. Systems thinking does not work in a way that you focus on one element and forget its effects on others. This latter way of seeing things produces severe misunderstandings about the world. And systems thinking reduces the number of misunderstandings.

The world is full of systems within systems

Your skin is a system within your body which is a system too. You cannot understand your skin without understanding the interconnections between your body and your skin. When you do something to your skin, your brain reacts to your action. If you burn your finger on a stove, your brain sends a signal to remove your finger from the stove. For this to happen, your skin is a receptor of the heat which sends the signal to your brain that it has detected something that is too warm for keeping your finger on it. Without these interconnections, the skin in your finger would burn for a long time on a stove.

Systems thinking helps you to figure out the longer-term effects of the effects of your actions. It does not focus only on here and now the effects of your actions. When you do something without thinking about the longer-term effects, you can have many unintended consequences which you could prepare for, if you had used systems thinking. With systems thinking, you can have higher odds of understanding the future than without it. It also helps you to remove your focus from the causes you cannot change to causes you to have the power to change. This saves you lots of time and effort without having many negative effects. Systems thinking helps also you to make sense of the structure of your systems. It deepens your understanding of them. You can see how different elements in your system interact. When one element changes, others react to this change. Then the whole system behavior will change, at least a bit.

A process with many questions

To understand how your system works, you have to ask many questions. You have to figure out which effects are related to which causes. You cannot understand and/or improve your system without understanding what happens and why. You can also solve problems related to your system with this process. Many of the questions you ask are not related to any special system. They are the same questions, no matter what system is concerned. Problem-solving and system improvement process has three steps:

First, when you start figuring out the effects of one element, you create wider views about the element and the timeframe you focus on. You ask questions about the interactions of many elements and what the future of the system will look like. Questions, like ”How will system elements interact in the future?”, ”If I change one element, how will the other elements behave in the future?”,

Second, you start figuring out how does the system behavior arises and changes. You ask questions like, ”What are the key circumstances and how fast do they change?”, ”In what directions do the key interconnections move?”, ”Do the feedback loops in a system balance or reinforce the interactions of the system?”

The third and final step is all about improving the system. These questions focus on the simple truth that systems are almost always improvable. You can ask questions like: ”Is this system as simple as possible, but not simpler?”, ”Do I need all these elements to get what I want from the system?” or ”Can these elements be improved somehow? The question about the last step is: Does the system improvement produce better results than the time and effort you will put on it? If not, you have to focus on other things.

-TT

Changing systems

Do you ever wonder why:

• A new political party in power doesn´t change anything for the people?
• Great and successful new CEOs cannot change the directions of the poor businesses when they are in crisis?
• All the newspapers yell ”We are doomed” when the world is a better place than before in many ways?

All these things happen because of the systems around you. You cannot change the system easily. And there are better and worse ways of improving systems. Before going to details, I recommend you to read the basics of systems from here if you are not aware of them. Let's keep things simple and focus on the most common and central components of the system: different elements of the system, interconnections between the elements, and the goal or purpose of the system. There are more components like feedback loops, but let's forget them this time. Some things are wrong when the aforementioned lunacies happen. This doesn´t mean that the system isn´t working. It means that the system isn´t working in a way people think it should work.

If your interconnections and the system´s purpose or goal don´t change, changing the system´s elements don´t change much how the system functions. You can change all the members of the parliament, members of the parties, reporters, and the board of directors in companies, but the functions of the systems stay the same. It doesn´t matter who you are or what you have done before, or how intelligent you are, the most probable results stay the same as before.

Changing the interconnections of the system brings more changes. When you change the interconnections, you change the elements, too. No dog will bite its master´s hand if he feeds it. And no employee will work against his employer´s will unless it happens by accident. The same happens with politicians. They won´t act against their financiers in the parliament. This can be seen anywhere in the world where politicians get money from other sources than their bank accounts. You may wonder why they aren´t working for their voters in the parliament? You have to ask a question: ”Which comes first, the money for ads before the elections or the votes? Great CEOs cannot work wonders with poor business models or bad products. When the poor business models have poor interconnections with a company´s clients or poor interconnections are in between the company and its departments, the direction of the company doesn´t change. Poor results stay poor.

The last but the most important component is the purpose or the goal of a system. It is also the single most important component for a well functioning system. It is not the most important thing for a system. The most important things are the mindsets behind the system´s different components. But let's forget them this time. Everybody has to understand that the stated purpose or goal of the system is not the real goal or purpose of the system.

For example, the purpose or the goal of parliament is not to take care of the voters´ interests in many countries. This applies to most of the countries, including the United States, Russia, and Finland. If you listen to politicians, they always talk about the importance of taking care of the voters´ benefits. If you look at the result, you notice that this doesn´t happen often. Most insanities that businesses do are because their purpose is to take care of their directors´ benefits or their owners´ benefits. The latter happens, for example, when companies work unethically. If you think about the newspapers, you can see that they sell with fear. Everything is always dangerous, or something isn´t working well. It is hard to see any positive news titles. Fear sells and newspapers sell-by inducing fears into your brain.

Do not blame people for the systems. They have only very limited effects on how systems work. Corruptive systems don´t change by changing elements. Non-functioning systems can have flaws in their design. They can move their interconnections and purposes slowly into wrong directions. Long-term socio-economic cycles are the results of the slow changes in systems in the wrong directions. We live in one such time. Something drastic will happen because corrupted systems always get destroyed. I have no idea what is going to happen, but I am wrong if something drastic won´t happen in the next ten years in Western countries.

Until next week,

-TT

The Most Important Task, MIT

This is the last text for this year. I will be back in the second week next year.

The Most Important task is not an important mental model, but it helps you to simplify your life. As you can see from the title, the Most Important Task is in a singular form, not plural. Zero is the simplest number, but you have to think the next simplest figure, one. One way to separate yourself from others is to have a perfect focus on the most important task. To say ”yes” to this task, you have to say ”no” to tens of others. This task has to be your top priority. The most important task can have different timescales. Your daily choices can be done for achieving your most important long-term task or goal.

Whatever you think is your Most Important Task, you need define it some way. And you need to understand why you have to do it. No task can be the most important without the reason. The reason can be something like, ”Without doing a task x, nothing else gets done” or ”By doing a task y everything else will be easier or unnecessary” Sometimes this task has to be put into separate tasks. Then, you have to define the priorities of these smaller tasks. You have your most productive hours of the day. Different people have different hours. Normally, these hours are from two to four hours after you wake up. You need some time to recover from your sleep in order to be productive. My most productive hours are somewhere from three to five hours after I wake up. You can do small experiments to figure out your own.

Be ruthless in focusing on the most important task. Do not let anything or anyone interfere with doing it. Close your e-mail notifications, put your smartphone on silent mode and educate everyone around you to leave you alone during this task. This is probably easier said than done. And it will take some time. Showing the improved results of your working days is maybe the only smart way to do it. Forget everything else until you get this task done. I recommend to put a deadline to it, because you cannot be productive the whole day every day for a long time. Other hours you can use for less important things like governance. You can define the most important task for a longer time frame than one day. If you do this, add these moments into your calendar. Future is hard to forecast. Therefore, I don´t recommend this. Timeframe have to specific in order to get things done.

To get the most important task done, you have to define the first physical microtask. It is harder to begin without defining it. For example, you have a toothache that makes your life miserable. Then, the most important task for you is to reserve an appointment with a dentist. The first physical task is to find a phone number for the dentist or find a good dentist from the internet. The definition of the right result is filling the cavity and the getting rid off the toothache. You can also define all the other physical and mental microtasks if you think it is necessary. You can also create a system or systems for getting this task done.

If you have originally thought something different for the most important task, change it when something else changes your priorities. In an ideal situation, the most important task is the same task every day. For example, most often, the most important task for me is to learn new things about the most useful mental models. It can be hard to believe, because I write and publish texts once a week. My priority is to understand the models and how to build a latticework around them. Writing more is not important now. Priorities can change in the future.

I want to wish everybody happy holidays! Remember to take some time to recover!

-TT

The Interconnections in and between systems

Before going to this text, you should probably read this, unless you are familiar with systems and its components.

Most things are interconnected. You cannot look only separate elements and their inputs and outputs and find out how the system works as a whole. You have to see how independent elements interact together. You have to understand what happens when an element A interacts with an element B. You have to understand what happens what happens to the element B when the element A changes its output or what happens to an element C, when the elements A and B change. Sometimes these interconnections are just information flows and sometimes they are feedback loops.

Interconnections can be loosely or tightly connected. Some of the elements can be isolated, but they are rare. It is also hard to find some systems that are isolated from others. Your body is one example of systems within the system. Some of its elements are loosely connected with others and some of them are tightly connected. Tight connections between different elements or systems are more efficient than loose connections. There are opportunity costs between the efficiency and the probability of not having a system failure. The more tightly connected the elements or systems are, the bigger the probability of system failure. When the failure hits the tightly connected element, the whole system will probably fail. In these cases, there is often only one path to a successful outcome. Systems can be loosely or tightly coupled as a whole.

Interconnectivity can be divided into four degrees of connectivity

Interconnectivity can be divided into four different degrees of connectivity:

1. Underconnected state: primitive cultures and undeveloped countries may be underconnected. This basically means that their environment may change without them knowing it. And they cannot do anything to react to the change.
2. Interconnected state: When the environment changes gradually, businesses, economic systems and governments are capable of keeping up with the change. For example, evolution works most often in the interconnected state.
3. Highly connected state: In this state, businesses, economic systems and governments are driving change. Capitalism, in its purest sense, works in a highly connected state. Sometimes it becomes overconnected.
4. Overconnected state: In this state, institutions, change so quickly that the environment in which they are embedded are unable to cope. Or the other way around: environment changes so quickly, because of the increase in interconnections that the institutions are unable to cope. Overconnected states provide disruption in one way or another. The crash of 2007-2009 was one of the best examples of a system in an overconnected state. The system failure was very close.

System safety and interconnections

Negative feedback loops mostly help make systems safer, but positive loops can cause serious problems. Positive feedback reinforces and amplifies change, accelerating it and causing the environment getting more unstable. In many tightly interonnected environments, initial stimulus works its way through the environment and back through feedback loops to provide more stimulus to the system. This drives the system faster in the same direction and causes rapid change. This rapid change causes more rapid change with increasing speed until the system will brake down. This is why you need to have balancing feedback loops in the system. They protect the system from rapid and unpredictable changes. These changes are the most dangerous ones. There can be long delays before these positive feedback loops start showing signs of trouble. Then it can be too late.

Information flows can also cause some problems in systems. They are always somewhat delayed. When the flow of information is delayed too much, the system can get into trouble. For example, when the balancing feedback loop has too big of a delay, the reinforcing feedback loop changes the system too much that it can cope with the change. Delays are hard to time properly. And they are also hard to notice sometimes.

Changing and removing interconnections can make a system safer too. Making looser interconnections can help systems become less delay dependent. They become less depended on the timing of the delay. Sometimes looser interconnections can help you to process things in parallel. Then you can have multiple actions in the same time. A system with tight interconnections may not be able to achieve this. You can also make a system safer by removing some of its interconnections. The more interconnections and the more tighter they are, the more probable it is that the system will fail. You should think about your interconnections in your systems and start removing all the unnecessary ones.

Sources:

Overconnected, William H. Davidow
Thinking in Systems Donella H Meadows

-TT

Feedback Loops

Definitions

Donella A Meadows has defined a feedback loop in her book ”Thinking in Systems” as ”A closed chain of causal connections from a stock through a set of decisions or rules or physical laws or actions that are depended on the level of the stock, and back again through a flow to change the stock.” A little simpler definition can be ”A path by which some of the output of a circuit, a system, or a device is returned to the input.”

Balancing feedback loops

These loops are goal or balance-seeking. They try to keep stocks stable and within a certain range. They also resist the change in systems. If stock level gets too high, balancing feedback loop will try to get it lower. If stock level is too low it tries to get it higher. For example, you have a room in which you want to keep a temperature within a certain range. You have a balancing feedback loop that keeps the temperature within the range you want. There are always some losses of heat in the room, when the temperature outside is colder. Your balancing loop adjusts the heating depending on how much colder the temperature is outside. When the temperature outside is much warmer than in the room, the heat outside comes in. Then your balancing loop will cool the air inside.

These balancing loops are not always working properly. The information from them can come too late, be unclear or incomplete or hard to understand. The action they cause can be delayed or ineffective, etc. Stock-maintaining balancing loops must have their goals set for compensating the draining or inflowing processes that change the level of the stock. All these loops have their own breaking point. This is the point where the pull of other loops is stronger than the pull of the balancing loop. When your heating system is not having enough heating power compared to the leaks outside, your room temperature gets too cold.

Reinforcing feedback loops

These loops are amplifying or reinforcing. They can cause virtuous or vicious effects of healthy growth or complete destruction. It creates a bigger or smaller inflow to a stock than is already there. Reinforcing loops enhance the direction of the change in a stock or a system. When a system element can reproduce itself or grows as a constant fraction of itself, reinforcing loops are found in the system. Reinforcing loops produce an exponential growth. Growth gets faster all the time. For example, the bigger the interest in your bank account, the more money you will get into your account every year, because you get the interest for the interest too. These loops may not change the system until the path of least resistance is overcome. For example, the sales of the new product may not start growing faster until a certain amount of product is sold.

Feedback loops are mostly linked together

Single loops are seldom at work in systems. Mostly, there are complex patterns of interconnecting loops. A single stock can have many balancing and reinforcing loops pulling in many directions. A single interconnecting flow can be attached to many different stocks. This flow can increase the ouflow of one stock and at the same time increase the inflows of many stocks. These feedback loops create a system behavior which is hard to predict. When you change the functioning or a goal of one loop, you may create changes in many others. In other words, one change can produce combinations of changes instead of one.

Lets keep things simple and concentrate on one stock system like population with both a balancing and a reinforcing feed back loops. This is one of the most common and important system structures. Lets start by identifying the most important inflows and outflows of the population. The most important inflow is people born into the population. The most important outflow is people dying. This kind of system changes when the relative strength of the loops change. In a normal situation, more people are born than dying. This means that the net effect of these loops is increasing population. It also means that the net effect is self-reinforcing growth in population.

When there is a sudden humanitarian catastrophe or a civil war in some population, the change reverses into diminishing population and the balancing loop dominates the behavior of the system. When these changes in relative strengths of feedback loops happen, the behavior of the system changes. A stock governed by linked balancing and reinforcing loops grows exponentially if the reinforcing loop dominates the balancing one. Stock declines exponentially if the balancing loop is dominant.

Other things to know about feedback loops

You have to remember that the delivery of information through a feedback loop will only affect future behavior. Feedback loop cannot deliver signal fast enough to have an effect in present. There are three typical delays in the real world. First, a perception delay. For example, a shopowner doesn´t react to any small changes in sales. She normally reacts, when the sales have changed for a longer time period, like five days. Second, there is a response delay. A shopowner makes up some part of any shortage with each new order. Third, there is a delivery delay. A subcontractor delivers the goods with delay because he has to process the order and deliver it. Changing the length of the delay will likely cause a large change in the system. When the delay is too short, the system behavior will likely oscillate.

Physical, growing systems are going to encounter limits. Those limits are balancing feedback loops. When the limits are achieved, these loops start dominating the systems by either strengthening the outflows or weakening the inflows. These limits are temporary or permanent. Eventually, the system will adjust to the limit or the limit will adjust to the system. There has to be at least one reinforcing loop delivering th growth and at least one balancing loop limiting the growth in the physical, exponentially growing systems. One interesting and important thing about feedback loops is that systems with similar feedback structures produce similar behaviors. Physically different parts do not really change behaviors.

Sources:

Donella H Meadows, Thinking in Systems
John H. Miller Crude Look at the Whole

Systems

Definitions

System is defined as: ”A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole or ”A set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.

Examples

Universe is a system. Our bodies, habits and skills are systems. Most of the things we do are systems. Some systems are consisted on smaller subsystems like our bodies have skin, organs, etc. Latticework of mental models is an example of a thinking system.

Self-reinforcing and self-stabilizing systems and delays

Universe is always expanding. The interest on interest compounds the debt. In self-reinforcing systems, the previous outputs of the systems change the inputs coming into the systems and amplify the outputs coming out of the system. What happens is that eventually self-reinforcing system gets to the point where the amplifying destroys the whole system. The other possibility is that the limit of growth comes to the point where the growth stops, slows, diverts or reverses. When this happens, the system becomes self-stabilizing.

In self-stabilizing systems the previous outputs of the systems changes the inputs by stopping, slowing, diverting or reversing the growth of the outputs. This self-correction keeps the system working without exploding. Every natural system has an optimal growth rate. We should use them into our advantage. Our skin keeps the temperature of our body from overheating by sweating if we are in an environment in which the temperature is too high or we are exercising. It can be hard to notice these balancing processes, even though they are mostly necessary. We should keep the self-reinforcing and self-stabilizing systems and their interaction in balance. We should always limit the effect of self-stabilizing processes on self-reinforcing processes in balance.

All the systems have delays. People have a natural tendency in concentrating on the consequences we see right after we have done something. The second and third order consequences may come after a long delay. In complex systems, consequences can come after years. We may concentrate on the symptoms, rather than the solutions because of delays. Some system structures have unrecognized delays and they can lead wrong solutions. We should have better awareness about the delays. And we should also remember that causes and effects are not always close in time. When we notice a delay, we should try to shorten it as much as possible.

Small changes in systems can create big results

This happens in individual circumstances as well as in systems. Well-focused small actions aimed for changing the system can create surprisingly big results. Solving a difficult problem can be a matter of finding the system structure in which the small change deliver the big and lasting results. Most of the times, finding these structures is hard. We need to understand the system and how its parts interact with each other. Otherwise we will never find the right structures for these high leverage improvements. We cannot do this without understanding the system as a whole.

Reacting to the change in the system is a lot easier than truly understanding its cause-effect relationships and ways to improve it with small changes. Reacting to the change can be a bad thing. It may cause small changes to the system structure creating bigger problems through self-reinforcing processes. Changing a system structure can have different consequences in the short run and in the long run. Different parts of the systems can also have different consequences caused by the small changes. We also have to think about interactions of the parts before changing anything in one part of the system.

Most of the results in your life depend on the quality of your systems

We are mostly focusing on the different parts of our systems in a particular moment without thinking about the system as a whole or any long-term consequences. Our systems can deliver results that exceed the sums of their parts by a large margin. They can also deliver results that are not even close to the sums of their parts. People using the same systems tend to produce similar results. When we do not change our systems we cannot expect different results. Most of the time, the results we get are not caused by other people, some particular conditions, bad luck or some other explanations. The reason for bad results are the systems or their implementation or our understanding of them. We should think a lot more about the quality of our systems or their subsystems. Then we can get better results. We cannot really improve ourselves without improving our systems.

Have a nice week!

Sources:

The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge
Work the System, Sam Carpenter

-TT