Harnessing systems thinking to better understand and impact change
The world is highly complicated, and most things are made up of many things that together work as a system, whether it is the human body, your car, or even your city. Most things around us are systems and have a lot of moving parts and processes that are interconnected. This also includes most things you will encounter, whether you are a data scientist, product manager, customer experience architect, product designer, or leader, to name a few.
There is even a whole field of study called systems thinking to help us understand, design, and innovate these complex systems. Systems thinking is "a set of synergistic analytic skills used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding systems, predicting their behaviors, and devising modifications to them to produce desired effects. These skills work together as a system." Ross D. Arnold and Jon P. Wade / Procedia Computer Science 44 ( 2015 ) 669 – 678.
Systems thinking is a skill that every data and product person should have. It is vital to identify and understand systems whether you are looking to identify and solve customer problems. This is important because systems are impacted and react to change, so when you affect something with your desired change, something else is changed. A Systems Thinking approach will allow you to understand the system holistically and anticipate and look for those impacts. The better you are at systems thinking, the better you will be at affecting organizational change.
One place to start applying systems thinking is with your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Each metric and KPI has an impact on your organizational system. Understanding and mapping out the metrics from your organization, from your strategic objective metrics down to each department and team's metrics and eventually down to individual metrics, will give you a holistic view of the organization from a metrics perspective. This will help you understand where friction exists, whether intended or not. This will help you know where strengths and weaknesses exist.
Another place where systems thinking plays an important role is in the area of personalization. Personalization is applying personalized service and offerings to your customer, whether you are a retailer, healthcare provider, financial service provider, etc. When you are seeking to provide personalization, you have a complex system of interactions with your customers that can generate significant amounts of data. Whether changing how you personalize marketing, in-service experience, recommendations, etc., you will be impacting your system. The more you can understand the overall system concerning the customer, the better you will be able to adapt resources to affect positive customer change and anticipate bad outcomes resulting from proposed changes.
The more you look around your work and world, the more I hope you start seeing systems. Much of our world is a system of systems. This allows us to zoom in and out of things and get perspectives of things at a more detailed and macro level through this zooming in and out. Take the opportunity to think about some of the systems you are part of in your organization, community, and personal life.
Let's say you have bought into the importance of systems thinking, and now you might ask, what are some things you can do to enhance your systems thinking skills? Here is a list of a variety of different resources you might want to check out:
How to Be a Systems Thinker: A Conversation with Mary Catherine Bateson
Mastering Systems Thinking in Practice Online Course on Open.edu
Developing a Systems Mindset Online Course on Coursera by the University of Colorado at Boulder
I hope this post has motivated you to understand the value of systems thinking, but I hope it has inspired you to enhance and apply your systems thinking skills.