Using the Archetype Family Tree

The Systems Archetype Family Tree is based on two principles: that the systems archetypes are related strategically to each other, and that many situations can be described by progressing through several archetypes as they are linked on the tree (see “The Archetype Family Tree”). The tool is intended to help you use the relationships between archetypes to figure out how to begin looking at a new situation, and to gain increasing understanding of a problem as you work through the tree.

For example, suppose you were one of the proprietors of that lawn care company. You would start at the top of the chart, thinking about the nature of your situation. Is the phenomenon you want to understand something that used to be growing, whose growth you would like to reinstate, or something that is growing too quickly and you are worried about where it might lead? Then wind your way through the statements on the reinforcing (left-hand) trunk of the tree to see if they apply to your situation.

In this particular case, growth was not an issue; they had a debt problem to consider. If you, like the lawn care company owners, are trying to fix a chronic problem that persists despite your efforts to fix it, you want to work through the balancing (right-hand) trunk. Again, follow the chain of logical relationships, continuing to identify elements of your story.

For example, the lawn care proprietors’ fix” was to borrow whenever their cash flow was low (BI in “A Diagnostic Journey through the Archetype Family Tree”). As they serviced their mounting debt, however, the fix came back to haunt them in a “Fixes that Fail” structure (R2).

A Diganostic Journey Through The Archetype Family Tree

Working through the family tree reveals that what began as a simple balancing process(borrowing to meet cash needs) becoming a “Shifting the Burden” structure, in which the real leverage is to tighten financial control.

The lawn care proprietors sensed they were trapped in a “Shifting the Burden” process because they were not addressing the more fundamental issue of weak financial controls (B3). The borrowing fix was making matters worse by reinforcing a “loose” spending mentality (R4). Having diagnosed the situation, they could take effective action by focusing more attention on the root causes of their problems — low income and high spending — by tightening their budget and investing in better financial management tools.

Experimenting

Experimentation is key to using the archetypes most effectively. It is probably most useful to look at a particular situation or problem through the lens of several different archetypes, moving through the “tree” as needed. You may find yourself combining archetypes, adding loops and links to adapt them more completely to your story. By the time you have gleaned what you can from them, the loops may be five or six generations removed from the original archetype with which you began.

Michael Goodman is vice president of Innovation Associates (Framingham, MA). Art Kleiner has a long-standing background writing about business, environment, and systemic issues. This material will appear, in a different form, in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Doubleday, forthcoming Spring 1994) .

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In “Success to the Successful,” the demands made by competing groups for a common resource (time, money, people, attention, etc.) are linked by two reinforcing loops. Because of the nature of the relationship, giving more to one group means leis is available for the other. For example, if more of a limited budget is allocated to Department A, A becomes more successful, which justifies allocating more resources to further its success. At the same time, less is allocated to Department B; therefore B’s success drops, which justifies not allocating resources to B. Over time, the performance of both parties reflects the way the resources were allocated — one keeps improving and the other stalls or declines.

In many cases, although it might seem like a “survival of the fittest” strategy is at work, the “Success to the Successful” structure suggests that the final result may be due more to initial conditions than to intrinsic merits. In other words, rather than a survival of the fittest, it is more a survival of the first.

When clocks were first invented, for example, there were competing designs for the direction of rotation; what we now refer to as clockwise and counter-clockwise could easily have been the reverse. There was no mechanical advantage of one direction over the other; one simply achieved greater initial acceptance. The result is that today the other direction somehow seems wrong.

A “Success to the Successful” dynamic is often difficult to stop because of the momentum that occurs from the reinforcing success loop. Halting that process requires a concerted effort to challenge the assumptions or processes that created the dynamic. The following seven steps are designed to help you or your organization critically challenge your success loops by unlearning what you are already good at, so you can learn new approaches and alternatives.

1. Investigate Historical Origins of Competencies

One warning signal that the “Success to the Successful” archetype is at work is if you hear yourself validating decisions by saying, “X is a good way to go, because it is clear by the progress to date that it outshines all the other alternatives.” A critical first step in using “Success to the Successful,” therefore, is to investigate the historical origins of a chosen course of action.

The QWERTY keyboard, for example, was intentionally designed to slow typists down because mechanical keys would jam if a typist was too fast (see RI in “QWERTY Success Loop”). Although the mechanical problem of jammed keys no longer exists, attempts to replace QWERTY with a superior design (e.g., a DVORAK keyboard) have had little success (R2). The QWERTY system has become entrenched because of the “Success to the Successful” loops and is difficult to dislodge because of the “competency trap” phenomena.

2. Identify Competency Traps

Competency traps lock us into a particular way of doing things simply because we are already skilled at doing it that way. Suppose, for example, you bought a software package and have become adept at using it. When a new software is released, everyone raves and says it is superior to the first. But you think, “I already know how to use this one, so I’m just going to keep using it.” Each time you use it, you invest more of your rime and resources to get to know it better, without gaining any skills in the alternative software. Over time, your competency “traps” you into continuing to use that package.

Such competency traps can turn your organization into a corporate dinosaur because they disconnect you from current progress and engender the belief that you have the way, the best way, or the only way. Even if your favored method is currently superior, once you get caught in the “Success to the Successful” loops, you won’t realize it when progress passes you by.

3. Evaluate Current Measurement Systems

The measurement systems you use can perpetuate your competency traps by making current successes look good and other alternatives appear less favorable than they actually are. Is your current system weighing too heavily the costs that have already been invested? Does it overly discount the opportunity costs of not switching or not scanning for other possibilities? If you think your system may be skewed in one direction, you may need to question the assumptions behind your current measurement systems and perhaps change them if necessary.

4. Map Internal View of Market Success

When you are successful in a market for a long time, you often begin to believe that your internal view of success is the same as the market’s view. The internal success loop can thus blind you to shifts in the competitive environment that are obvious to less successful players. Mapping your internal view of success will make the operating assumptions explicit and clear.

5. Obtain External Views of Market Success

To complete the picture, you need to obtain external views of market success. This usually requires getting an assessment from a true “outsider” to the organization or industry. Internal attempts to map the external view run the danger of looking too similar to the internal view. IBM, for example, had a very successful mainframe business that rein-forced its belief in the superiority of mainframes over emerging alternatives (see R3 in “Internal View of Success”). IBM therefore made relatively little investment in the PC business, which translated into little success in that market arena (R4). The arrival of personal computers did not change IBM’s internal view of success (customers want and need mainframes), so the company was slow to respond to the challenge of the market’s view of success (customers want cost-effective computing solutions such as PCs).

6. Assess Effects on the Innovative Spirit

Competency traps and inaccurate views of the marketplace indicate how the “Success to the Successful” archetype can erode the innovative spirit of the organization. This trap is characterized by the old management adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Instead of allowing one successful way to predominate, use the archetype to question how you think and perceive. The challenge here is to always entertain alternatives in a highly innovative spirit.

7. Be Your Best Competitor

By nurturing an innovative spirit and continually scanning for new alternatives, you can become your own best competitor. With this mindset, you become the most critical of your own success, continually looking for gaps and areas for improvement. For example, Proctor & Gamble’s approach of having multiple brands compete with each other helped the company become and remain the industry leader in many markets. By viewing your successes as if you were another company, you can find ways to create a competing product or service that may be better or more successful.

“Success to the Successful” is one of the toughest structures an organization has to overcome because many choices are often made subconsciously, influenced by the momentum of past actions. It is easy to become trapped in your success by continuing to learn how to do the same thing better. Applying the archetype can hopefully help you design your successes to be a product of continual learning rather than the inertia of past achievements.

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Apparently, size does matter these A days—particularly in the American biotech industry. According to Hambrecht and Quist, an investment bank, large biotechnology companies (those with market capitalizations of $1 billion or more) have enjoyed a 7percent jump in shares since early 1999. At the same time, relatively small firms (those worth less than $200 million) have dropped in value by 12 percent.

As The Economist observes, “Rich biotechnology firms seem to be getting richer mainly because they offer results that investors can understand: products on the market, and profits right now. Many such companies had their start in the 1980s . . . when all it took to catch an [investor’s] eye was a bright idea and a lot of energy.”

This situation bears a resemblance to other strange phenomena in life— when something (a company, an individual, a product) gets a lucky head start and just keeps getting bigger, richer, or more successful. One “lens” through which to view this situation is the “Success to the Successful” systems archetype. In a “Success to the Successful” situation, if one party (A) is given more resources through some random event, it has a higher likelihood of succeeding than another party (B). This initial success justifies devoting more resources to A than B. As B gets fewer resources, its success diminishes, further justifying even more resource allocations to A.

In the biotech industry, the attention and funding that certain firms attracted during the halcyon days of the industry’s emergence gave these firms a “jump start” that has sustained their growth ever since (see R1 in “Success to the Big Firms”). Companies that missed out on these early opportunities failed to attract investor dollars. They never managed to achieve high-profile status in the industry—a fate that has only strengthened investors’ loyalty to the originally successful firms (R2).

SUCCESS TO THE BIG FIRMS

Early successes for certain biotech firms attracted lots of investor dollars, which furthered these firms’ success and attracted additional capitalization. Those initial successes set up a systemic structure by which other firms that didn’t get lucky during the industry’s emergence never “got off the ground.”

Stopping the Spiral?

It’s easy to blame investors for contributing to the situation through their individual decisions. But on the other hand, they’ve got valid reasons for staying loyal to the bigger companies. Made impatient by their bountiful earnings during the industry’s early days, investors now have little interest in waiting out the “slow-but-steady progress that goes into building a biotechnology company. . . .” Biotechnology is also a risky field, with very few products surviving clinical trials and making it onto the market. This uncertainty just reinforces investors’ desire to play it safe by sticking to the large, proven companies.

So, given the power of this systemic structure, what’s a smaller biotech firm to do? As The Economist opines, such companies should consider merging, so as to amass the heft they’ll need to do battle with the big guns. They might also gain an edge by forging R&D partnerships with pharmaceutical firms or larger biotech companies. Finally, venture-capital financing seems to be alive and well; if they can manage to attract these dollars, smaller biotech firms may have a chance to regain some momentum—and turn this stubborn spiral around.

Lauren Keller Johnson is publications editor at Pegasus Communications

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Not-So-New New Year’s Resolutions

As we start the new year, many of us take the time to jot down some New Year’s resolutions. If you are like most people, you may find that a few of the items on your list were also there last year—and the year before and the year before that. Why can’t we make the changes that we have “resolved” to make and that, in most cases, we have the power to accomplish?

One easy response may be that we don’t really want to do some of the things that we commit to doing. We come up with “politically correct” items like eating less red meat and more organic vegetables so that we can dutifully produce our list when someone asks us, “Are you making any New Year’s resolutions?” Let’s remove those gratuitous pronouncements from consideration and look at the changes in behavior that we really do want to accomplish, such as losing weight. Are we just too lazy or weak-willed to fulfill our commitments? Before we berate ourselves yet again, we may want to examine our situation from a systemic perspective. The “Success to the Successful” archetype can help us understand the structural forces that are preventing us from carrying out our well-intentioned resolutions.

Organizational Law of Inertia

The “Success to the Successful” structure is largely driven by inertia. In physics, the principle of inertia means that, barring outside influences, an object that is in motion will tend to stay in motion; an object that is at rest will generally stay at rest. In the case of “Success to the Successful,” the person or project that initially succeeds will continue to succeed. On the other hand, the person or project that, for whatever reason, gets a late start will tend to fail.

Why can’t we make the changes that we have “resolved” to make and that, in most cases, we have the power to accomplish?

So, it’s easier to maintain existing habits (such as eating more and exercising less than we should) than to establish new ones (like sticking to a diet and walking at lunch time). The structure of our organizational systems—and our own mindsets—contributes to the forces that produce these predictable results. To better understand how this dynamic works, let’s take a detailed look at the behavior over time of this archetype (see “Initial Dynamics of ‘Success to the Successful’”).

The center of the diagram illustrates the overall results of this archetype: As the resources dedicated to A and A’s success both increase, the resources invested in B and, in turn B’s success decline. The insets above and below this graph provide a more detailed look at the initial dynamics that play a critical role in this longterm outcome. We devote resources to A (which represents the original or the more favored person, product, or activity) for some time with no visible success; therefore, in the beginning, the net returns for A are low or even negative. Sustained investment, however, eventually leads to A’s success. The key here is that, if we sustain our investment in A beyond a critical point, A begins to generate positive returns. Beyond this critical threshold of positive returns, A’s success is likely to be self-sustaining, because continued investment brings ongoing positive net returns.

In the case of B, we start by making the same initial investments as for A but, for whatever reasons (poor timing, external forces, the effects of learning curves, etc.), B takes longer than A to become successful. In many cases, the reason for A’s comparative success is that it had a head start in and is already beyond the critical threshold of positive returns. Thus, B’s net returns stay low or negative longer than A’s, and B begins to look less attractive as an alternative. As a result, we decide to invest less and less in B, which delays B’s achievement of success even further. At a certain point, we may even begin to take away resources, such as people and equipment, because we don’t want to waste them on a “lost cause.” In turn, B’s performance only declines further. We eventually conclude that B is a failed experiment and abandon it.

In the case of our New Year’s resolutions, the success of our old habits in giving us satisfaction makes it difficult for our new efforts to produce equally compelling benefits in the first few months. So, we may pat ourselves on the back for trying to drop a few pounds, mutter something to the effect of “It just wasn’t meant to be,” and comfort ourselves with another hot fudge sundae.

Overcoming the “Survival of the Fittest” Mentality

In a way, the “Success to the Successful” archetype helps show why something that looks like a fair and equal setup is often rigged to favor one party over another. The imbalance can stem from some random external event, a personal bias, or simply the momentum of the first party’s current success. Unfortunately, many management decisions are based on a “survival of the fittest” mentality that ignores the effects of this initial imbalance. As a result, we may not end up with a particular person, product, or activity because it is the “fittest,” but rather because it was either the first or the most widely available option. In this way, we may ultimately accept an inferior outcome over what could have been—and possibly ruin a career or two along the way.

We may continue to use inferior methods because we are familiar with them.

In order to achieve the best possible outcome, we need to be sure that we gave the second alternative a fair shake instead of dooming it to failure from the start. This is particularly important when A is already well established, because any comparisons of B to A tend to make B look less appealing. In this case, comparing A and B would be like judging the performance of a five-year-old child against that of a ten-year-old and concluding that the younger child is inferior and not worth further investments. But, in actuality, the five-yearold may be much better at accomplishing the task than the older child ever was at that same age. Without separating our evaluation of B’s performance from A’s, we may end up sticking with current levels of competency at the expense of developing competency for the future.

INITIAL DYNAMICS OF 'SUCCESS TO THE SUCCESSFUL'

The center of the diagram illustrates the overall results of this archetype: As the resources dedicated to A and A’s success both increase, the resources invested in B and, in turn, B’s success decline. The insets above and below this graph provide a more detailed look at the initial dynamics that play a critical role in this long-term outcome.

People and organizations often suffer from this “competency trap” because, in the short run, it seems to make more sense to invest in something that is already successful than in something new and untried. The downside of this tendency is that we may unwittingly continue to use adequate but inferior tools or methods simply because we are familiar with them. This inclination can have dire consequences when we fail to invest in newly emerging competencies (e.g., when IBM was slow to recognize the importance of personal computers).

To break out of a competency trap, we must clarify our goals for the new product or initiative and identify the resources needed to achieve those objectives. We then must examine how the success of the current effort may systematically undermine support for the new initiative, and find a way to decouple the two.

It Was the Best of Times . . . Initially

“Success to the Successful” raises questions about what drives success in certain situations. It also shows how, if we are not clear about the overall result that we are trying to achieve, the differences in initial conditions alone can have powerful long-term effects on the outcome. Finally, this archetype illustrates how we can persuade ourselves to stay in old lines of business or outmoded ways of doing things simply because we are already good at them. To escape from this trap, we need to look beyond what works and clarify what we actually want in the longer term. We may then be in a better position to keep some of our resolutions this year—and next.

Daniel H. Kim, PhD, is publisher of The Systems Thinker and a member of the governing council of the Society for Organizational Learning.

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