How did this happen? All your planning schedules seemed up-to-date, and there were no indications of delays. Now each of the departments is blaming the others: “If only they had given me x on time…” “If only the packaging group had let me know when they first knew they were falling behind…” Now you will have to hassle the different departments to get the parts out as quickly as possible, like you did with the last program. But you thought the problem had been solved—the company made it clear that late parts and missed target dates would not be tolerated. In fact, severe penalties were out-lined. What happened?

The Problem-Solving Treadmill

The above scenario is typical for many people caught on a problem-solving treadmill. The “Fixes that Fail” archetype provides a starting point to help you get off the treadmill by identifying “quick fixes” that may be doing more harm than good (see “Fixes that Fail: Oiling the Squeaky Wheel — Again and Again…” November 1990). The central theme of this archetype is that almost any decision carries long-term and short-term consequences, and the two are often diametrically opposed.

In the case of the product launch, the fix that was meant to keep everyone on target actually made things worse. Penalizing those who missed deadlines created a dynamic where no one dared reveal that they were running late. If no one was “discovered” before a critical deadline (like prototype test), then everyone would be discovered at the same time, and no one person or team could be singled out. After that crisis was addressed, schedules would be stressed even more and penalties for failure would be increased…again. The result: programs are continually run with inaccurate information, creating rework and further hurting the schedule.

Getting off the problem-solving treadmill starts with becoming aware of how one is operating in such a structure. What follows is a seven-step process for mapping out the systemic consequences of quick fixes and for identifying high leverage actions.

1. Start with the Problem Symptom (and only the symptom)

Oftentimes we confuse “problem solutions” with problem symptoms. We are so used to responding to certain types of problems that we begin to see the lack of our solutions as being the problem. Problem solution statements like “The problem is….we need a bigger sales force,” or “The problem is…we don’t have the latest order processing system,” can lead you right back on the problem-solving treadmill.

It is important to spend some time up-front defining the problem symptom. This will force you to understand the problem as separate from any actions that you have taken, are taking, or plan on taking. Try turning problem solution statements such as “lack of sales training” into problem symptom phrases like “falling sales volume.”

2. Map Current Interventions

After you have clarified the problem, you can map out various past “solutions,” as well as current and planned actions. This is where you may include your favorite solutions such as sales training, marketing promotions, advertising campaigns, etc. In each case you want to draw out how the interventions will rectify the problem. For example, marketing promotions make it more attractive to buy now vs. later, which leads to higher sales (loop B1 in “Fixes for Falling Sales” diagram).

By following the discipline of clearly articulating how your actions affect the problem, you create an explicit map of your causal assumptions. The output of this mapping process can be used to show others how you understand the problem, and invite them to add to or modify the diagram from their point of view.

3. Map Unintended Consequences

One action can produce multiple consequences. People are usually good at recognizing the intended results, but not as good at identifying the unintended consequences. Use the causal diagram to map out potential side-effects of any actions you have taken to rectify the problem.

For example, one danger of repeatedly using marketing promotions to boost sales volume is that the products become less attractive when they are not accompanied by promotions. Over a period of time, product image erodes and sales decline. This exacerbates the sales volume problem, which then justifies the use of more marketing promotions (R2). This tendency of the system to reinforce the need to take the same actions again and again is at the heart of “Fixes that Fail.”

4. Identify Loops that Create Problem Symptoms

Treating symptoms can become a full-time job, since each set of fixes creates new symptoms that beg to be “solved.” To stop the treadmill, however, we must identify what is causing the problem in the first place. This search for the fundamental cause may lead to very different questions. Instead of looking for ways to solve a “falling sales problem,” for example, we should try to understand what factors directly affect sales (aside from the fixes we have already proposed).

Some root causes may include quality of customer service, number of new products, manufacturing lead times, or product quality. As you explore the root causes of falling sales volume, for example, you may discover that the number of new products has been declining in recent months. The next question to ask is: “How is the problem symptom connected to the number of new products (or any of the other potential root causes)?” You may find that in response to revenue pressure in the past, investments in new products were curtailed. The effects of that decision are now being seen in the reduced number of new products, which further aggravates the falling sales volume (R3 in “Shifting Emphasis to Marketing Promotions”).

5. Find Connections between Both Sets of Loops

Oftentimes, “fixes” and fundamental causes are linked together in ways that further reinforce the continued use of the fixes. Identifying the links can highlight the many ways fixes can get entrenched in a company’s routine.

Shifting Emphasis to Marketing Promotions

As product attractiveness relies more on promotions, the emphasis on promotions increases. This leads to more promotions (R4) and lower investments in new product development (R5), which will further exacerbate the falling sales volume (R3).

In our marketing example, as the product attractiveness depends more on promotions, emphasis on promotions will increase, leading to more promotions (R4). Investments in new product development, on the other hand, will be reduced as the company shifts its attention to marketing (RS). The resulting diagram looks similar to a “Shifting the Burden” archetype, as the company grows more dependent on marketing promotions to push sales. (A “Fixes that Fail” structure usually carries the seeds of a “Shifting the Burden”).

6. Identify High Leverage Interventions

Identifying high-leverage interventions usually means cutting or adding links in the causal maps. These actions represent structural interventions that will alter the policies that affect how people make decisions and take action.

Cutting the links from “revenue pressure” and “emphasis on marketing promotions” to “investments in new product development,” for example, decouples investment decisions from other responses to falling sales volume. On the other hand, adding a link between “erosion of product image” and “investments in new product development” can channel important market information that can be used to enhance the product’s appeal.

7. Map Potential Side Effects

For every contemplated intervention, try to identify side-effects that may be undesirable (using steps 3-4 above). By mapping them in advance, you can better prepare to respond or perhaps design around them altogether.

Summary

The preceding seven steps are meant as guidelines (not a rigid set of rules) for systematically mapping out the multiple consequences of actions. The resulting diagrams can help clarify the critical issues and provide a common, shared understanding of the problem in order to design more effective and long-lasting solutions.

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Overall Guideline

The tools of systems thinking are best used as a vehicle to promote team learning in the organization. Whether you are doing “paper and pencil” models or creating full-fledged microworlds, the process of constructing and using models is primarily about exploring and examining our “mental models” — the deeply held assumptions that influence the way we think and act.

General Guidelines

DON’T use systems thinking to further your own agenda. Systems thinking is most effective when it is used to look at a problem in a new way, not to advocate a pre-determined solution. Strong advocacy will create resistance — both to your ideas, and to systems thinking. It should be used in the spirit of inquiry, not inquisition.

DO use systems thinking to sift out major issues and factors.

Benefit: systems thinking can help you break through the clutter of everyday events to recognize general patterns of behavior and the structures that are producing them. It also helps in separating solutions from underlying problems. Too often we identify problems in terms of their solution; for example “the problem is that we have too many (fill in the blank: people, initiatives, steps in our process),” or “the problem is that we have too little (resources, information, budget…).”

DON’T use systems thinking to blame individuals. Chronic unresolved problems are more often the result of systemic breakdowns than individual mistakes. Solutions to these problems lie at the systemic, not the individual, level.

DO use systems thinking to promote inquiry and challenge preconceived ideas.

Cues that non-systemic thinking is going on: Using phrases such as “We need to have immediate results,” “We just have to do more of what we did last time,” or “It’s just a matter of trying harder.”

Getting Started

DON’T attempt to solve a problem immediately. Don’t expect persistent and complex systemic problems to be represented, much less understood, overnight. The time and concentration required should be proportional to the difficulty and scope of the issues involved.

More realistic goal: to achieve a fuller and wider understanding of the problem.

DO start with smaller-scale problems.

DON’T attempt to diagram the whole system — otherwise you’ll quickly become overwhelmed.

Better try to focus on a problem issue and draw the minimum variables and loops you’ll need to capture the problem.

DON’T work with systems thinking techniques “on line” under pressure, or in front of a group that is unprepared for or intolerant of the learning process.

Additional danger. if the audience is not familiar with the concepts and methods of systems thinking, they might not understand that the process reveals mental models, can be controversial, and is highly iterative in nature. It is far more beneficial to have the group engage in their own loop building after appropriate instruction and foundation has been given.

DO develop your diagrams gradually and informally, in order to build confidence in using systems thinking.

Good practice: look at newspaper articles and try to draw a few loops that capture the dynamics of a problem being described. Even better: try matching a template to the article.

DON’T worry about drawing loops right away. One of the strongest benefits of the systems thinking perspective is that it can help you learn to ask the right questions. This is an important first step towards understanding a problem.

Drawing Diagrams

DO start with the process of defining variables. DO encourage airing of assumptions.

Benefit: better shared understanding of a problem. Diagramming is a very effective tool for promoting group inquiry into a problem or issue.

DO start with a central loop or process. Then add additional loops to “fill in” detail.

Example: the central loop may show how the system is supposed to work, and the additional loops can explore what is pushing it out of whack.

DON’T get bogged down in details. Start simply, at a high level of generalization, but with enough detail to sum up the observed behavior.

Example: if you are exploring the causes of missed delivery dates in a factory, lump together the types of products that are experiencing similar delays.

DO begin by looking for templates or general structures that might clarify the problem.

DO work with one or more partners.

Advantage: multiple viewpoints add richness and detail to the understanding of a problem.

DO check with others to see if they can add some insight or improve upon your diagram — especially people in other functional areas who might have a different perspective on the problem.

Example: with a manufacturing delay problem, you might check with finance to see if there are any dynamics in the finance arena that are effecting the manufacturing delays (capital investments and purchases, etc.). The same can be done for marketing, sales, etc.

DO work iteratively. There is no “final” model (set of loops). Looping is a learning process which should continue to evolve with new data and perspectives.

DON’T present “final” loop diagrams as finished products. Better: Present as a tentative and evolving picture of how you are seeing things. To gain buy-in and maximize teaming, the audience needs to participate in the modeling process.

DO learn from past history. When possible, check data to see if your diagram correctly describes past behavior.

Interventions

DO get all stakeholders involved in the process. This will help insure that all viewpoints have been considered, and will improve the acceptance rate for the intervention.

DON’T go for vague, general, or open-ended solutions such as “Improve communications.”

Better: “Reduce the information delay between sales and manufacturing by creating a new information system.”

DO make an intervention specific, measurable and verifiable.

Example: “Cut the information delay between sales and manufacturing down to 24 hours.”

DO look for potential unintended side-effects of an intervention.

General principle: “Today’s problems often come from yesterday’s solutions.” Any solution is bound to have trade-offs, so use systems thinking to explore the implications of any proposed solution before trying to implement it.

DON’T be surprised if some situations defy solution, especially if they are chronic problems. Rushing to action can thwart learning and ultimately undermine efforts to identify higher leverage interventions. Resist the tendency to “solve” the issue and focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the structures producing the problem. Be wary of a symptomatic fix disguised as a long-term, high-leverage intervention.

Michael Goodman is vice president of Innovation Associates, Framingham, MA. The material in this article was drawn from his 20 years of experience in the field, as well as business courses developed by Innovation Associates.

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In the face of day-to-day pressures, groups often leap to solutions after only a modest amount of brainstorming. A systemic approach, however, provides a structured problem-solving process for digging deeper into our most vexing problems.

To get a sense for how systems thinking can be used for problem identification, problem solving, and solution testing, we have outlined a six-step process. To use this process on a problem in your workplace, try the worksheet on page 9.

1. Tell the Story

The starting point for a systems thinking analysis is to get your head above water enough to start thinking about the problem instead of just acting on it. An effective way to do this is to gather together all of the important players in the situation and have each one describe the problem from his or her point of view.

At Bijou Bottling Company, the problem was usually a customer complaint: “Where were the 40 cases of 2-litre Baseball tie-in product that were ordered last week?!” Somehow Bijou would get the goods there on time, whatever it took—including air shipping heavy soda in glass bottles at enormous costs. But this crisis management led to a culture where people built their careers on coming in at the 11th hour and turning around a customer complaint.

2. Draw “Behavior Over Time” Graphs

In the storytelling stage, most of the energy is focused on the pressures of the current moment. When we move to “Behavior Over Time” (BOT) graphs, however, we begin to connect the present to the past and move from seeing events to recognizing patterns over time.

Draw only one variable per graph on a Post-it note so it can be easily moved around in the steps that follow. The time frame should span from past up to the present—but it can also include future projections (see “Bijou Over Time”).

3. Create a Focusing Statement

At this point, you want to create a statement that will help channel energy during the rest of the process. This statement may involve a picture of what people want, or a question about why certain problems are occurring. At Bijou, for example, the focusing statement was: “We’re pretty good at solving each problem as it arises. But why are these problems recurring with greater frequency and intensity? What is causing them?”

BIJOU OVER TIME

At Bijou, crisis management efforts had increased over time, while the effectiveness of the production/distribution system had decreased.

4. Identify the Structure

You now want to describe the systemic structures that are creating the behavior patterns you identified. The systems archetypes are an easy way to begin building a theory of why and how things are happening (see “Systems Archetypes at a Glance,” V22N6, August 2011).

Begin by reviewing the story, graphs, and focusing statement to see if they follow the storyline of an archetype. If so, draw the loop diagram for that archetype, place the Post-its of the variables in the diagram, and move them around on a flip chart until you have a diagram that seems to capture what is going on.

The group at Bijou decided that their problem matched the “Shifting the Burden” storyline, in which a problem is “solved” by applying a short-term solution that takes attention away from more fundamental improvements. They identified a balancing loop that described how customer problems were solved with heroic “11th-Hour” efforts (the symptomatic solution) at the expense of improvement and redesign of the production/distribution system (the fundamental solution). As people “learned” over time that heroism is rewarded, their willingness and ability to address system-wide problems decreased (see “Shifting the Burden to Heroism”).

SHIFTING THE BURDEN TO HEROISM

At Bijou, customer problems were solved with heroic “11th-Hour” efforts (B1) rather than with improvements in the production/distribution system (B2). Over time, people at Bijou “learned” that heroism is rewarded, which reduced their willingness and ability to address system-wide problems and increased the company’s dependence on heroic efforts (R3). One negative side-effect of Bijou’s “heroism” attitude was that customers were taking problem situations and escalating them to crises in order to get the company’s attention (B4).

5. Going Deeper into the Issues

Once you have a reasonably good theory of what is happening, it is time to take a deeper look at the underlying issues in order to move from understanding to action. There are four areas you should clarify:

• Purpose of the System. Ask yourself, “In the larger context, what do we really want here?”
• Mental Models. Begin the exploration of mental models by adding “thought bubbles” to those links in the diagram that represent choices being made (see “Mental Models and Systems Thinking: Going Deeper into Systemic Issues,” V23N5, June/July 2012).
• The Larger System. Add links and loops to enrich the story and connect the relationships to the larger system.
• Personal Role. Acknowledge and clarify your own role in the situation.

For example, when the people at Bijou looked at the larger system, they wondered what role their customers played in the system. They theorized that customers were taking problem situations and escalating them into crises in order to get the company’s attention (B4).

6. Plan an Intervention

When planning an intervention, use your knowledge of the system to design a solution that will structurally change it to produce the results you want. This might take the form of adding a new link or loop that will produce desirable behavior, breaking a link or loop that produces undesirable behavior, or a combination of the two. The most powerful interventions often involve changing the thinking of the people involved in the system.

At Bijou, the key to change was realizing that the problems were largely self-inflicted. They realized that they had to make progress on production/distribution system improvements while still doing enough fire-fighting to keep things afloat. In the longer term, they would need to change the reward systems that promoted heroic behavior. They also recognized the need to sustain the improvement efforts even when the pressure came off—otherwise the problems would be back again soon.

Part of a Cycle

Even as systems thinkers, it is easy to fall back into a linear process. But learning is a cycle—not a once-through process with a beginning and an end. Once you have designed and tested an intervention, it is time to shift into the active side of the learning cycle. This process includes taking action, seeing the results, and then coming back to examine the outcomes from a systemic perspective.

Michael Goodman is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and practitioner in the fields of systems thinking, organizational learning and change, and leadership.

Richard Karash is a founding trustee of the Society for Organizational Learning, a founding member of the SoL Coaching Community of Practice, and a co-creator of “Coaching from a Systems Perspective.”

Editorial support for this article was provided by Colleen Lannon.

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