Making systems more approachable

How to Use Systems Thinking One: Understand the Big PictureUsing mapping as a tool to understand the complexity of a problem or project, we level-set the playing field by making it visual and giving all stakeholders the opportunity to understand it. There are different ways to map, and it is important to define the relationships between elements wh... See more

Systems come with rigidity and they can thus become a mental trap that narrows your view of the world. But when you combine them with frequent reality checks, systems are a most powerful tool to interpret the world and share your interpretation with others. When you’ve crafted your own system to comprehend things such as politics, history, technolo

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Many people study and admire high-performing organizations like Toyota and Amazon but struggle to understand how to catalyze performance across their own organizations. To catalyze and foster that performance, you need a system to enable effective action. You need to focus and align your efforts to a valuable target state, develop shared clarity on

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The first, and most obvious thing, is that they are visual. If I was going to move a piece on a map then I could point to where it was and where it needed to go. Navigation was visual but that was normal. Except, I realised it wasn’t. When people stopped me in their cars to find their way to the nearest petrol station — this was 2004 and GPS was st... See more

What I've come to recognise as core to my practice is the challenge of taking an extraordinarily complex, integrated, incomplete problem and wrapping my arms around it conceptually in a way that helps and empowers practitioners to actually do things about it.

In the real world, the systems we build are part of complex adaptive systems that encompass developers, users, and customers, as well as their environments and organizational contexts. This reality calls for a more dynamic, almost organic approach to architecture and design, one that allows you to learn as you go and adapt your software to ever-cha

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