Systems Thinking

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 18:11:56 +0000

Occasionally I work with clients who have a major problem in delivering on time and to the agreed quality. When I start to investigate the causes I find that when I talk to the product team they say the problem is that engineering is not fast enough and/or they produce too many defects, and when I talk to engineering they tell me that they get incomplete specifications from product, which means they have to spend more time developing, and sometimes they have to undo changes because they were not what the customer wanted. It is common for these organisations to see themselves as a set of silos, and to believe that the solution lies in “fixing” one of these silos (e.g. engineering). But this is a reductionist view of the problem, and rarely helps to solve it. To address the root of the problem, we need to rethink how we understand the organisation, and this is where systems thinking can help. As Einstein said: “We cannot solve problems by thinking in the same way as when we create them”.

Systems on CTOMultiplier

Systems Thinking