Leadership

Embrace your limitations

What is it about some individuals and organizations that make them jump out the crowd and rise above average? How are people like Stephen Hawking, suffering from ALS, or Temple Grandin, born with autism, able to overcome their limitations and become the best in their fields? It sometimes seems that the ones who truly achieve something phenomenal are the ones who initially have the biggest limitations.

The truth is, limitations can actually work in your favour. I recently watched a TED talk from Phil Hansen, who while in art school developed a permanent nerve damage making his hand tremor and shake uncontrollably. As an artist, Hansen’s hand was his greatest asset and being no more able to draw a straight line was naturally devastating. Hansen eventually left art school and refused to do art for a long time. However, after searching himself for three years he found a new style of drawing that complemented his shaking hand. With his new style he was actually able to do beautiful art without being hindered by the nerve damage in his arm.

Then something very interested happened in Hansen’s life. Hansen had rarely had enough money to buy the tools and equipment he would have wanted to use in his art, but after getting a new job he decided to stack up in art supplies. For a moment he felt joy for not being limited due to a lack of proper supplies and for finally being able to think outside the box. However, shortly after buying the badly needed supplies, he got stuck in a creative slump that lasted for a long time. Hansen was dumfounded. Why is it that while finally having enough tools to do the art he wanted, his mind becomes completely blank? The reason dawned on him later. His mind had simply become paralyzed by all the options that were now available to him. Not being limited in any way actually hindered Hansen’s ability to think creatively.

Doesn’t this somehow sound familiar? Haven’t we all had these moments where you desperately try to overcome some barrier, thinking that if it wasn’t for that one thing you would be able to succeed. And when you finally do overcome the barrier you just end up feeling blank and paralyzed? This happens also with relatively simple issues. I have sometimes paralyzed myself on my off-days just by trying to choose how to spend my time. Even renting a movie feels sometimes more exhausting than relaxing because of having to make a pick among thousands of options. It would seem that our minds get stuck when there are no limitations – when there are no barriers to guide us.

Imagine, for example winning a lottery  – something many people dream about regularly. What would it feel? Amazing? A dream come true moment? Initially many would be at the top of their worlds, but what do you think happens when the euphoria settles? Many lottery winners actually blow their money and ruin their relationships because they could not handle their new life situation. Suddenly all the limitations you previously had are gone and there’s no one telling what to do next, which is not easy to handle.

Luckily Hansen realized this and he eventually came to embrace his limitations. He realized first hand what many designers and creative thinkers intuitively understand, which is that limitations are in fact a source of creativity. Ever since his epiphany Hansen has found ways to self-impose new limitations into his work, including only using self-destructive materials or painting on his belly.

How to use limitations?

Hansen was able to use his natural limitations to his advantage, eventually creating new limitations to act as a source of creativity. This is something that many great individuals and organizations have also learned and which separates them from the masses. Steve Jobs was known for his unrelenting requirement for beautiful product design, with no exceptions. He even demanded that the insides of Apple’s products – where no one would ever look – must look beautiful. Jobs’s uncompromising attitude towards design (and deadlines) imposed a limitation on Apple that forced the company’s people to work in new ways and think outside the box.

Companies and individuals who have uncompromising principles and who set standards for themselves are in fact limiting themselves in a creative way. They are forced to design their future according to their self-imposed limitations – often transforming themselves to something outstanding, something we all look up to. What we as individuals can learn from Hansen and his kind is that to become limitless we must embrace our limitations and actively seek ways we can exploit them.

How can we use limitations as a source of creativity and growth? Here are several suggestions to consider:

  • Set standards for yourself. What are your must-haves, your top priorities that you will not compromise? Think of Steve Jobs or any other uncompromising person you know as a source of inspiration.
  • Try to turn your weaknesses into strengths. Ask yourself how can you take advantage from a potential weakness. Phil Hansen became proficient at finding new ways to create art due to being unable to use his hand. If your weakness is writing, for example,  maybe you can become an excellent public speaker instead?
  • Use deadlines, budgets, or other limitations to provoke creativity. If you’re building something, set limitations for the materials you can use. When practicing sports, limit yourself in some way and try to work around that limitation.

Ps. Here is the TED talk from Phil Hansen:

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systems thinking

Stock and flow pt.1 – introduction and intuition

So far I have done my best to provide some intuition about systems thinking and why it might be important to you (while sharpening my own thinking as well). Through the few examples, we now understand that a system is the product of the interactions of its parts and that the structure of the system causes its behavior. We also know to look for circles of causality instead of fixating on one time events. I will now introduce another very important concept that will further enhance our basic understanding of the systems we deal with in our every day lives. It will also allow us to develop some real systems thinking skills and habits.

Stock and flow

If you let water run freely into a bathtub with the drain plugged up, the water level will start to rise steadily until it fills the bathtub. You have built a stock, in this case a small body of water, into the bathtub. By unplugging the drain in the bathtub, you can increase the outflow of water from the tub, thus decreasing the stock of water. If you had both the faucet on and the drain unplugged, you would have two flows of water, with one flowing into and the other out of the bathtub. Similarly, if you refill your refrigerator without using any of the food, you will have accumulated a stock of food. When you begin consuming the food, you increase the outflow from the stock, thus changing the size of the stock. In systems thinking terms, you have created a system of stock and flow.

Bathtub

Stock and flow systems are a fundamental systems thinking concept that are used when doing a system analysis. It is important to understand stock and flow systems because it helps us understand the various systems that affect our lives. A stock and flow system is usually illustrated with a following kind of image:

stock and flow

Usually flows are represented with an arrow similar to the one in the picture, with stocks depicted as squares. The small thingy on the arrow represents a mechanism which can influence the flow into the stock. In the bathtub example the mechanism would be the faucet, but it can also be something immaterial, e.g. laws or other restrictions. The small cloud at the other end of the arrow represents a source, which is ignored for the purposes of narrowing down the analysis.

The world is full of stock and flow systems that affect our lives. Airports, train stations, and busy intersections are good examples of physical stock and flow systems. Fisheries are important stock and flow systems found in nature, and are often mentioned when talking about sustainability issues. Many industrial companies can be modeled as relatively simple stock and flow systems, with a flow of supplies coming in for the manufacturing process and a flow of finished goods coming out. Similarly schools, hospitals, banks, grocery stores, and even complex political and social systems can be modeled as stock and flow systems.

But why are stocks and flows so important? What does it matter if we know about them or not?

Well, think about the way we usually approach stock and flow systems in our daily lives. We tend to be somewhat ignorant about our behavior towards stocks and flows: how many times have you ended up depleting your stock of food before going to the grocery shop? And how many times have you been stuck in traffic because you did not leave early enough to avoid it? There must have also been times when you have run out of money before the end of the month, having to either use up savings or eat noodles to get by before next pay check. We all tend to have difficulties balancing the stocks and flows of our every day lives.

But since we have difficulties dealing with these very simple systems, what about more complex and more important systems? We often treat natural systems the same way we are treating our refrigerator. We deplete fisheries and acidify the oceans. The rainforests are being hacked away at an alarming rate and we have also been extremely efficient at killing off numerous species of animals. Furthermore, we don’t seem to fully understand the workings of our own man-made systems either! This was demonstrated in the 2008 financial crisis, whose aftermath we are still living today.

If we want to live in a sustainable way and make sure we have a place in this world, we need to develop our understanding of the systems we deal with every day. Understanding stock and flow is only one part of the equation, but it is a very important part. In order to better understand stock and flow, I will next time talk about balancing and reinforcing feedback!

Practice suggestion: Try to look for stock and flow systems in your surroundings. Try to identify the different flows and the stocks they are flowing into and out of. Notice: the flows and the stocks can be either tangible (e.g. water, people, food) or intangible (electronic currency, ideas, political opinions).

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Systems Thinking examples

Systems thinking example 3: the faucet

In the previous two examples I have introduced two basic systems thinking principles. The automobile example from Russell Ackoff demonstrated that a system is not the sum of its part but the product of their interactions. The second example was from Donella Meadows, and the lesson was that the behavior of the system can only be changed by changing the system itself. In this blog post I will briefly touch upon how to think about any situation using systems thinking with an example from Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline.

Let’s begin again with a thought experiment. Imagine that you’re thirsty and decide to have glass of water. You take a glass, go to a water tap and fill the glass in order to have a drink. If we were thinking linearly, we would see a simple cause and effect relationship: you filling a glass of water. However, the situation looks different from a systems point of view. (The below pictures are from Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline.)

Faucet

When you’re filling the glass with water, there are actually several things happening at the same time. You have a desired water level in mind, so while the water is pouring into the glass, you’re monitoring the ‘gap’ between the current water level and your goal. As the water level rises, you are adjusting the faucet with your hand and finally closing it when the water has reached the desired level. You are, in fact, engaged in a system that has five variables:

  1. the desired water level
  2. the current water level
  3. the gap between the two
  4. the faucet position and
  5. the water flow

Faucet 2

The above picture illustrates how the different elements of the system influence one another. You can begin reading the picture from anywhere. An arrow indicates the direction of influence. Desired water level influences the perceived gap, which influences the faucet position, which again has an influence on the water flow. When the water flow changes, it in turn has an effect on the current water level, which finally influences the perceived gap.

This is how systems thinkers view situations, problems and the world in general. Instead of one time events and simple cause-effect relationships, they see circles of causality. This thinking can be applied to practically every major problem out there.

Think about terrorism for instance: most of the time we only pay attention to the one time incidents and terrorist attacks we see in the news. What we don’t know is what has been influencing the terrorists in a way that causes them to take violent action. With only superficial knowledge about the reasons behind terrorism, we then respond in fear and anger, which often only increases the terrorists’ conviction.

Not all situations work this way though. If you were to kick a ball, the ball would simply bounce away. Here a simple cause-effect analysis would be sufficient and the event could be explained with physics. However, if you were to kick a dog, the poor creature would react in some way. It might run away, but it could also attack you. You are influencing the dog’s behavior by kicking it and in return the dog will influence your behavior by attacking you. If I were to walk in a room where I only see the dog attacking you, I might easily jump into conclusions about the dog too quickly. This is how we humans perceive the world most of the time, which is why our problem definitions are often so badly off the mark.

The Principle: Instead of seeing one time events, look for circles of causality.

Other implications of this principle:

  • Next time when someone is angry at you, try to look for ways you might have influenced his or her behavior.
  • In the news you see only one time events and the end results of some larger phenomenon. Instead of talking about the event itself, try to think about what kind of circles of causality might have caused the event.
  • In an arms race between nations there is no one country or individual to blame. It is the result of all the countries influencing one another.

Ps. Take a look at this short introductory video for systems thinking:

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Systems Thinking examples

Systems thinking example 2: Slinky

Slinky

In her book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows tells how she would often bring a slinky to her classes in order to teach her students systems thinking. What exactly can we learn about systems thinking from a slinky?

Suppose you’re holding a slinky in one upturned hand with the other hand under the slinky. Holding the slinky with one hand you pull the other hand away and let slinky loose. As you’d imagine, the lower end of slinky will bounce up and down in air, with the upper end suspended in your fingers. The question is: what made slinky bounce up and down?

The first answer that might cross your mind is that your hand was the cause. By removing your hand below slinky you let it loose which made it bounce. However, it’s clear that you would not get the same reaction by holding a book, a hammer, or anything else other than slinky in your hand. Slinky bounces up and down because of some inherent characteristic within slinky itself. If that’s the case, what does this actually teach us about systems thinking?

In slinky’s case its easy to understand that slinky is a physical system whose behavior is fundamentally dependant upon two things: 1. the characteristics of the system, 2. outside forces affecting the system. If you manipulate slinky in different ways you would get different behaviors, but the behaviors would always be closely related to slinky’s internal qualities.

But why is this important? Well, just think about how governments, politicians, organizations and institutions usually approach problem solving. Drug problems are solved by putting addicts into prison, type two diabetes is taken care of by prescribing medicine, and poor economic growth is resolved by subsidizing badly performing industries. Different countries have their own bad examples, but the thinking behind the issues is often the same. We as humans tend to often focus only on changing the way we manipulate a system, instead of changing the system itself!

With simple physical systems we know how to make system change possible: you would not use slinky to hammer a nail, you’d use a hammer. However, with more complex systems, such as schools systems or cities, we sometimes forget that the behavior we witness is the result of the system acting the way it’s design to act. If the end result of a system is drug addicts and population suffering from diabetes, then the system has been designed to produce these results. Instead governments and organizations often find blame in some outside forces. They try to fix the issue by starting initiatives and programs rather than changing the system itself. In the US the government appears to often declare war against societal issues, effectively preventing any real change from happening. In Finland, our government attempts to get students to graduate faster by placing restrictions on maximum study years, which is another demonstration of linear thinking.

The principle: The system itself often causes its own behavior. In order to change the behavior, change the system.

Other implications of this principle:

  • A failing industry is not always the result of bad policy or leadership. Creative destruction is part of the continuous cycle of innovation that drives our economies (a self-renewing system)
  • Type two diabetes and heart problems are not the failing of an individual. We have encouraged the development of industries that produce foods that are cheap and unhealthy. We have also made easy access to these foods possible.
  • Long times of graduation in Finland are not because students are lazy. Our education system encourages students to postpone graduation.
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Systems Thinking examples

System thinking example 1: the automobile

In my previous post I discussed about what systems thinking is. However, systems thinking can best be understood by viewing real life phenomena and everyday issues through the systems lens. In the coming posts I will try to demonstrate systems thinking through examples I’ve learned along my studies.

 

Russell Ackoff’s automobile example

Russell Ackoff (1919-2009) was a pioneering organizational theorist and a systems thinker who has inspired me in many ways. In his days, Russell Ackoff would often demonstrate systems thinking with an example about building an automobile. The story would go something like this:

Suppose you’re building the best automobile in the world. You would go about it by first bringing each of all the car models in the world to one place. You would then hire the best automobile engineers and mechanics in the world and ask them to determine which of the cars has the best engine. If the engineers say that the Rolls-Royce has the best engine, you would pick the Rolls-Royce engine for your car. Similarly, you would ask your engineers to find out which of the cars has the best exhaust system and pick that for your future car. Using this method, you and your team would go through the necessary parts for building an automobile and in the end have a list of the best parts available in the world. You would then give the list to your engineers and mechanics and ask them to assemble the car. What do you think you will get?

The answer is obvious: you don’t even get an automobile! The parts won’t simply fit together. An engine from a Rolls-Royce won’t work well with an exhaust system from a Mercedes. The performance of the automobile is dependant on the interaction of its parts, not on the performance of the parts taken separately.

It’s extremely important to understand that the idea works the same whether we’re talking about building an automobile, governing a nation or running a company. This is relatively easy to understand with physical systems such as an automobile, but with more complex systems like cities it often gets more difficult.

The principle: A system is not the sum of its parts, it’s the product of their interactions.

The original example is at 5:57 in the below video. Enjoy!

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systems thinking

What is Systems thinking?

Systems thinking is a way of viewing the world. According to systems point of view, the world is built around varying kinds of systems. How can this perspective help us view our problems in a different way and help us solve some of the most difficult issues of our time?

Imagine you are living in the suburb of a large city. You go daily to work by taking the bus, which takes a lot of time and forces you to wake up very early in the morning. After some consideration you decide to buy a car in order to free up time and to make the commute more tolerable. At the beginning you feel great: now you can sleep a little longer and there’s no more waiting in the bus stop! You also have more energy because of longer hours of sleep and more flexible timetable.

After a while though, you start to see the costs of owning the car. Gasoline prices are rising and the car needs maintenance, which is why you have to reduce your overall spending. Some mornings there are traffic jams and every now and then you end up late from work. The increased costs and the unpredictable traffic both increase your stress levels and you feel some regrets about buying the car. It appears that the solution to the original problem only caused other issues!

When we approach problems in our daily lives, we usually assume that a given problem is the end result of some simple cause-effect relationship. This is because we are taught early in our lives how to use analytical thinking to solve issues. However, this kind of thinking has its limits. It assumes that every problem can be taken apart and that the parts are in linear cause-effect relationship. The problem is that not all issues fit into these criteria.

In the above example the long commute was seen as the problem to be solved. The cause of the problem appeared to be the bad bus connections, which was solved by buying a car. However, the car itself ended up being the cause of the second problem, which was higher costs and stress due to traffic.

Fortunately there is another way to approach problems that can bring new light to the above issue.

Systems thinking

”Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots’.”

Senge, P. (2007). In his book The Fifth Discipline.

Systems thinking is a conceptual framework that sees the world as a system of interconnected wholes. Whereas in analytical thinking in order to understand the whole you take it into parts, in systems thinking you would instead try to understand how the parts are connected to each other. The relationships between the parts of the whole are not assumed to be purely cause-effect relationships. Furthermore, a system thinker would pay close attention to how the whole itself is connected to its environment.

“A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that it achieves something”

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems.

Using systems thinking in the above long commute example, you would not try to solve the problem by buying a car, but instead you would try to understand the issue from a broader perspective. You would actually try to see yourself as part of a system that is formed by you, your home, your workplace and the modes of transportation available to you. From this point of view, if the problem is long hours of commute, by buying a car you are only optimizing parts of the system. Thus, when the basic structure of the system remains unchanged the problem only changes location. By optimizing parts you do not necessarily solve the issue, but only end up shifting it to other parts of the system.

From a systems perspective it is equally important to understand the relationship between the parts as it is to understand the functioning of each individual part. This realization has very important implications to our every day lives. In the commute example you could find other solutions by considering the relationship between your home and your workplace. What is the fundamental role of commute? Is it to move from place A to place B, or could we perhaps frame it differently? In this case the fundamental issue is about organizing work: in order to work, you have agreed to be at your desk when your employer asks you to. But could this be arranged differently? Perhaps you can work at home some days, or maybe you could work at a nearby café? If this is impossible, maybe you could move closer to your workplace in order to minimize commute time.

Another incredibly powerful example of this kind of thinking is understanding how an architect would plan a house. When planning a house an architect would probably first decide what and how many rooms will go into the house, and decide about the general outline of the building. Most importantly, the architect would plan each room in a way that would not compromise the overall performance of the whole! The architect understands that even if an individual room would look great and perform well, it can’t stay if it makes the house worse.

In my blog I will explore and share resources about systems thinking. I will also talk about other related issues, such as complexity, chaos and sustainability, with the intention of learning and sharing what I’ve learned. These topics might seem abstract at first, but they have incredibly important implications to the lives of individuals, organizations and societies. Please join me in my quest to explore the interesting world of systems!

If you wish to learn more, here is a video about systems thinking that I have found useful, hope you’ll enjoy it:

References:

Senge, P. (2007). The Fifth Discipline. Random House, London. pp. 68.

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems. Chelsea Green publishing, Vermont. pp. 11.

 
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