Don’t we have people who handle this sort of thing? 

In an organization, being a leader involves more than simply finding solutions for problems within your direct responsibilities.

It also involves addressing the problems that might impact everything that relates to your overall work experience.

That’s the impact of systems thinking. By seeing and respecting the contextual structures that underlie complex situations, you can share observations and suggest ideas for creating improvement across the entire organization.

Even if they don’t have an immediate impact on your daily tasks.

Here’s a thought experiment as practice. Let’s say you work at a place where a disproportionate number of team members have been getting sick, missing work, and staying home to avoid infecting the rest of the team. It sucks, but it does happen.

But the strange part is, you have been feeling fine. Great, actually.

How might you respond?

Some employees might shrug their shoulders at all this company wide sickness and say, well, not my problem, people’s germs haven’t affected me yet, so, let’s hope people feel better.

Classic diffusion of involvement behavior. Where the bigger the group is, the less responsibility people feel to offer aid to other members during times of crisis.

Don’t we have people who handle this sort of thing? Not my job.

However, as leaders, we have an opportunity to take extreme ownership here. Starting by thinking systematically.

Okay, if over half the team has been getting sick for the past three months, maybe we should take one step back and answer some questions.

What might be the operational causes of this pattern that we’re afraid to look at?

What if the total number of sick days isn’t our real issue, but a symptom of a larger problem that we need to confront?

It’s funny, business consultants are famous for dropping the cliche, your problem isn’t your problem.

And in this hypothetical situation about sick says, they’re not wrong. If the majority of the employees at the firm sick, sure, it might be the changing seasons, it might be the pollen count, it might be that pesky flu that’s going around, or it might be that slimy dude from the engineering department who doesn’t cover his mouth when he sneezes.

But more than likely, people are sick because of the stressful work environment. Chronic stress has been clinically proven to link to the six leading causes of death, and that’s most likely the problems.

Accordingly, there are now new questions that need to be asked.

What work are we doing that is too labor intensive commensurate with the benefit?

What tasks could we be doing eighty percent as effectively, but in ten percent of the time?

What time boundaries could we put on our work so that it doesn’t keep expanding in scope?

Those are systems thinking questions.

Leaders ask them, not because they’re directly impacting their immediate responsibilities, but because they’re negatively impacting their overall work experience. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How do you see and respect the contextual structures that underlie complete problems?