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Understanding the bigger picture5/7/2023 Stream that connect data across the whole enterprise and provide users withĪctionable insights to drive decision-making and foster collaboration. Urgent questions for organisations across the asset intensive industries whereĬreating a coherent view of the whole is key to understanding markets andĪddress these challenges, visualisation and workflow solutions are coming on Whole, how can they take a step back to find more value? These are certainly Rather than looking in bafflement at the bits and bytes that make up a larger Given the above challenges, how can businesses start to see the bigger picture? Today are facing the challenge of not being able to see the whole pictureĪcross their enterprise and not being able to make decisions because of sparse You’ll see at multiple levels of an organisation when they’re shown the “whole It wasn’t until they took aįew steps back from being so close that they saw a beautiful painting.ĭaughter’s facial expressions ranged from shocked, to amazed disbelief, to More information and registration.I asked them to their eyes again and I walked them backwardsĪ couple of feet. Why not join us for our upcoming systems thinking course taking place 2 June 2017 in Nyon, Switzerland? Olympia Mitsopoulou Kolyris, Managing Partner, ATOM WAVE “The systems thinking course helped me understand the vicious cycle I was experiencing in my business. With this new understanding, I was able to break the vicious cycle and now I have made good progress in the direction I wanted.” Our Bright Green Learning Academy systems thinking course – “ Communicating Complex Challenges Using Tools from Systems Thinking” – explores how to use these tools and approaches in our work, the questions we need to ask when planning or reviewing a project, and how to ‘unblock’ a situation to make progress or generate the change needed. And they work beautifully with groups, to communicate these dynamics, check our assumptions and agree together on pathways forward. These tools can help you step back and see the bigger picture, making systems more visible, the inter-connections more obvious, and the opportunities for change more apparent. When we have a clearer picture of our system, we then have a much better chance of finding a ‘leverage point’ and a strategy to change things.Ī systems thinking approach can be effective in many situations, from high-level strategic planning, theory of change and organisational development work, to improving the productivity of a team of five. Using diagramming tools, such as Behaviour-over-Time graphs and Causal Loop Diagrams (this is more fun than it might sound) can be highly valuable in helping us think through what is going on and enable us to better understand the cause and effect relationships at play. We need to get better at spotting them and using this understanding to inform our actions. In the language of systems thinking, it’s all about feedback loops. We’ve all wondered at times, “Why does this keep happening?” This question is the sure sign of a system at work! This empowers team members to act and gives you time for further creative learning around positive leadership (rather than spending your time micromanaging team members) and time to help those who might need additional support to work more independently.Īnd then there are those times where, despite your best efforts to change a recurring pattern, something in the system is resisting this change. For example, you develop a leadership style that encourages people to manage their own projects independently and take credit for their own successes. You have also likely seen examples of virtuous cycles where the inverse is true and interaction of a number of interconnected variables makes things better and better, according to what you would like to see happening. You might describe such things as ‘spiraling’ out of control. This means the HR department spends all its time hiring, and has even less time to develop a staff training programme. For example, the Human Resources department is too busy to offer staff training, but the lack of capacity development opportunities makes staff members look for other work to grow. We have all seen, in our personal and professional lives, examples of vicious cycles where the effect of one action causes a knock-on effect that somehow loops back with a negative effect on the first, making things worse. Thankfully, there are also useful tools that can help us think through what is going on and strategise about how to best move forware – some of the most valuable are tools from systems thinking. There are undoubtedly great, daunting challenges presented by working within systems that seem to be constantly changing and have many moving parts. Working with complexity and uncertainty seems to be a feature of everyday life in our organisations and projects.
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