Let’s take a moment to think about thinking. The Greeks taught us about linear thinking, in which logic and sequential analysis are used to come to conclusions about the world around us.
Here’s an example of linear thinking: “Customers like coupons. If I put a cou-pon in the newspaper, I will get more business.”
This is a valid logical structure—the kind of structure that we use hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day to make decisions. Having applied a label to this method of thinking, I would like to introduce you to an alternative way of using your brain, called systems thinking. Systems thinking is a way to think of many things at once (a system of interconnected processes) instead of one thing at a time (linear). Systems thinking will allow you to visualize your business in mul-tiple dimensions, to feel the ebb and flow of the inputs and outputs, to feel the sense of timing and balance within it, and to effortlessly access the rich field of information and potentials that exist outside of the standard linear-thinking mindset.
Here’s an example of systems thinking: “Customers like coupons. If we run a coupon in the paper … I can feel a number of aspects of our business that change at once … the ad spend … branding effect of the reach of the ad (de-pending on the approach) … distraction of marketing team from core business
… customer expectation of getting discounts may hurt us since we don’t usually do coupons” (and 100 other things, all felt and wordless).
As an illustration of the process of visualizing your business from the inside—a systems-thinking approach—let us take a brief trip down the road together and think about driving. The next time you drive your car, notice how you are
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processing the experience. It will likely feel like the following common-sense statement: “I am sitting in my car and driving down the road.” But there is more for you here …
Try this the next time that you are driving: feel the steering wheel in your hands. There is vibration from the road coming up through the frame of the car to your seat. Can you feel it? Feel the texture of the road beneath the tires. It is interesting how the smoothness of the road is punctuated by minor variations in the concrete.
Allow your awareness to expand beyond your body and take in the whole length and width of the car. As you change lanes, accelerate, and decelerate, allow yourself to sense the car as you would your body. You can feel the whole car moving. As you drive, relax into the experience of the car as your body. This is very comfortable, and you are more in control and more aware of the driving environment than you were before.
As you travel, you are seeing that the road ahead begins to turn gently. You are allowing your awareness to expand forward ahead of the car and feel the curve in the road. When you finally get to the curve you are already pulling in unison with the change in direction.
There are cars and trucks on the road as well. You can feel them, too. With-out words, you change lanes to avoid a slower truck ahead of you. Your awareness takes it in, and you automatically feel how its change in position and speed affect you.
Can you see where I am going with this? With this creative riff on a quick drive down the road, we are playing with something altogether different from a li-near visualization of a body sitting in a car holding a steering wheel and pushing on the accelerator pedal. This is a transition from a separate, isolated, New-tonian model of a person plus a machine to a systems-thinking approach.
Systems thinking takes into account multiple simultaneous variables and inputs.
The potential result of this is the synthesis of information and understandings that would be unavailable to you if you were thinking in a linear fashion.
As another illustration, I was recently on a walk in Zilker Park near my office in downtown Austin. Just 5 minutes from the office is a patch of woods that has within it a kid’s summer camp facility. This facility has installed a 15-foot log, suspended by steel cables just inches off the ground, which is like a moveable, rounded balance beam. The first time I tried to get up and balance on it, I im-mediately fell off. Same for the second and third tries. I gave up that first day,
and came back the next day. That time I got on the log again and fell off again.
On reflecting on why it was so hard to balance, I realized that I was thinking about it all wrong! I decided to allow my systems-thinking mind to kick in, and let my thinking expand beyond my own body to encompass the log, the cables, and the ground. Suddenly (and without effort) I had access to feedback me-chanisms and a way to feel my way into the problem of balance. I was imme-diately able to walk all the way down the log and back without falling off. The difference? Nothing except the way I was looking at it.
Thinking about this phenomenon, I took my kids to visit the park and did an experiment with them. My two sons (Mitchel, age 5, and Connor, age 10) were excited about this balance log and immediately tried to traverse it—and fell off.
I let each of them try two or three times, and they teetered and repeatedly stepped back to the ground, frustrated. I wanted to try to get them into a sys-tems mindset to see if they could increase their ability to perform this task.
I told them, “Let your feeling reach into the log beneath your feet. Feel into it and relax. Feel into the log and it will stop moving—you will be able to balance with no problem.” I kept repeating this as Connor immediately stabilized his balance and walked the length without any problem. Mitchel then tried, and I repeated the same thought: “Let your feeling reach into the log beneath your feet. Feel into it and relax. Feel into the log and it will stop moving—you will be able to balance with no problem.” The five-year-old was also able to walk the length of the log without falling. Both of them succeeded on their first sys-tems thinking–assisted attempt. This is the power of a changed perspective.
I believe we are all wired naturally to do this. In fact, I think it is more basic and intuitive than language-based linear thinking. The trick is to recognize this fact and allow yourself to relax into the alternative whole system–thinking model.
In business, this kind of visualization is of critical importance to me. I make it a point to build a multifaceted model for each business that I am involved in, which takes into account a long list of variables. Examples are
• The product
• The customers
• The marketing plan
• The team of employees
• The geometry of relationships between marketing, customers, and products
• Financial models for marketing, products, and staffing
• Frequency of events such as updates, product releases, and so on
This list will be long enough to include every bit of information that you know about the company, the market, and the world at large. The end result of each of these elements coming together is a laboratory environment—a representa-tion and model that can be used to test any potential change to business strat-egy, tactics, or operations.
The feeling of having the model in action is that of a morphable, multi-dimensional structure that can be rotated in space, twisted, analyzed, rolled forward and backward in time, split apart, and otherwise manipulated in any way that the imagination can create. For me, this structure is experienced from inside and throughout it. Key to this structure are the geometric relationships inherent in the business. How many customers are coming in? Are they online or are they real customers in stores? With what frequency? What percentage of the time do they actually make a purchase? What structures outside of the business are bringing them in? What is the timing and dependency model for the marketing plan? These questions are not asked in words, but by applying them physically to the model and observing how the feeling changes. The ex-perience of it is effortless, and the field of available information is incomparably rich.
What does all this thinking do for you?
Having built the understanding of the business, and having assembled the model, the model is just waiting to be asked questions. But questions without words. What repeatedly has happened in my experience is that someone says,
“OK, we are going to do this and this in the marketing plan.” After plugging it into the model, there will be an immediate conclusion, for instance, that “the plan doesn’t make sense, and here’s why.” What may follow from this is a 20-minute discussion of why it doesn’t make sense. That discussion (with white-board diagrams to support it, of course) may take quite a while to work through because the logic needs to be translated out of a systems-thinking perspective (which is wordless and nonlinear) and put into a language-based linear model for sharing with other people. This takes time.
As I said, I believe that we are all naturally wired to do this. It is simply a mat-ter or recognizing the potential of it, and turning off the language cenmat-ter of your thinking long enough to get inside and feel the relationships in your busi-ness instead of asking yourself in words. Take the time to play with this. I
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started doing this about 20 years ago, and I am still learning how powerful it is.
I use it daily. It is where the “wow” factor comes from when bringing strategic guidance to my businesses. Let it be the wow factor for you too.