First Principles Based Leadership – Introducing Systems Thinking for Leaders

Premise

This post is relevant for you irrespective of where you are currently situated in leadership ladder (Individual contributor, team lead, leading teams, leading managers, leading lines of business or leading organisations).

While systemic awareness this is a foundational skill, it gets more and more crucial as you climb the leadership ladder.

So, we would be better off learning about this while we are early in our careers and build on it as we grow by adding nuances and being intentional and learning from our experiences interacting with systems.

What is a system?

Before we can start to understand or start thinking in systems, we need to first understand what systems are.

So, here is how we can define a system:

A whole which is defined by its function in a larger system of which it is a part and consists of at least two essential parts.

Given that this is how we define a system, we can see that there are two insights that we can gleam.

1. All systems are always a part of another system.
2. All systems need to have at least 2 parts to come together.

Understanding Systems

Here are some of the properties of any given system:

1. Each part of a system can affect the behaviour or properties of the entire system (interconnectedness).
2. No part has an independent effect on the whole.
3. Every subset of parts can affect the behaviour or properties of the whole and none of them have an independent effect on the whole.
4. The way a system responds depends on how the parts interact with each other and not how the parts behave independently.
5. The performance of a system is not necessarily improved by improving the performance of the individual parts (local optima vs global optima).
6. The performance of a system is not the sum (+) of the performance of its parts but the product (x) of their interactions.

How to think in and about systems

Here is how we can start thinking in and about systems:

1. The first step is to understand the larger system of which the system we are studying is a part of (abstraction).
2. Understand the behaviour of or properties of the containing system. This determines the goal of the system that we are trying to study or influence.
3. Disaggregate the larger system into its components so that we can identify the role or the function of the system we are interested in the larger system.
4. Try and understand how these systems interact with each other and their relationships.
5. Always look to optimise for the performance for the goals of the system that is containing the one that we are interested in.
6. Every time we make a change in any of the components of a system, we should be intentional in looking out for expected and unintended consequences of the change in the system we made the change in and the system that contains this system.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are operating within systems of systems.

The better we get at understanding how systems function and how they interact with each other, the better we will get at optimising the performance of the system. The better a system performs, the better our results are going to be.

Knowing which system to optimise (wisdom) and knowing how to optimise (expertise) it are two very different things and we need to strive to learn and get better at both.