Leading You Me We 07 Systems Thinking

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Session 7
Systems Thinking
• We have different levels of needs. Some are "higher" or "spiritual."
1. People pay the most money to get their highest or spiritual needs met. Think of 
the offering plate at church.
• As a leader you must meet people's physical, emotional, and intellectual needs. But 
to create the most value and reach the highest levels of leadership, you must meet 
their spiritual needs too.
• Emergents: Properties that surprisingly "emerge" and that are different than the 
individual components of the system.
1. Examples: a living human, tropical storm, a mob, the Internet.
2. Leaders look for Emergents and expect them to show up.
• System: Something more than the sum of its parts that you couldn't predict by just 
looking at the individual components
1. Example: liver cells vs. the liver as an organ.
• If you want to improve a system, it's not about improving the individual parts... it's 
about improving the interaction between the parts.
• The more you push, the more the system pushes back. Systems strive to maintain 
homeostasis.
1. Think of it as a spider web. Pull on a piece of web, it bounces back to its original 
state.
• Variety: the number of different states the system can be in.
1. Only variety can control variety. If you want to control a system, you must have 
more variety than the system.
• Leverage: What is the smallest change we can make that'll have the biggest change in 
the system?
• We evaluate a system by Ecology.
1. Ecology is the study of long-term consequences.
2. Things frequently get better in the short term before they get worse in the long 
term.
3. Leaders look at long-term consequences. Few people in power do.
• Within systems, often the short-term and long-term results are essentially opposite.
• In a system, you can never make just one change, because every change effects other 
parts of the system.
• People who don't understand systems thinking are always making short term 
changes, then saying, "Oh, what's the big deal..."
• "Life is hard if you live it the easy way, and easy if you live it the hard way."
• You can't convince anyone to do anything. All you can do is provide the factors they 
need to convince themselves, because that's what they're going to do anyway.