6d. My Drim Journey: Part 4 (Systemic Thinking)

My last post shared the first two tricks to finding the repeating patterns that underlie challenging situations.  I shared these tricks first, to provide the context for today’s post, which is about the most powerful and significant thing we’d developed until that point: Systemic Thinking.

It’s hard to find patterns – at first

We’re blind to repeating patterns because we’re really good at seeing differences, but not that good at seeing – and are even bored by – similarities.

Really experienced experts (and geniuses) see and act on repeating patterns intuitively but, because it’s intuitive, the insights are seldom captured and so vocabulary to describe them doesn’t ever get developed.

Not having words to describe patterns makes them even harder to find.

The first two tricks: A reminder

Once I’d stumbled upon the Fractal (Repeating Patterns) Phenomenon, the next step was to develop a method – a simple technique – for deliberately and systematically finding repeating patterns.

The first two tricks to finding patterns are:

1. Use a pattern template or model – I suggested the GPS (Goal|Problem|Solution) Pattern, but you could just as easily use any other model.  The beauty of models is that they can capture and communicate insights that we don’t have vocabulary for yet.
2. Instead of looking for the entire pattern, look for the pattern across each entity in the pattern, one-by-one.  The beauty of this is that it enables us to find the parts of the pattern, without needing to understand the entire pattern first.

As helpful as these two tricks were – and are – to finding patterns, they didn’t (and still don’t) provide a step-by-step process that anyone can follow for deliberately and systematically finding repeating patterns.

I was plagued by the fear that finding patterns was more of an art than a science – when I wasn’t plagued by the fear that I was going mad: seeing patterns that weren’t actually there, like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind! (More about this, in a later post.)

I was determined to find a simple method that would surface the repeating pattern every single time, without fail, but it was “doing my head in”.  Perhaps it was an art?

Systemic Thinking

One day everything just fell into place – and I couldn’t see why it had taken me so long.  It seemed so obvious, in hindsight.

What we came up with was simple – extremely simple – and seemed to apply to nearly everything in life.

Here’s the method

It’s a three-step process1I initially thought that it might take more than three steps, but it turned out that three – two pattern-finding stages – was enough in even the most complex and challenging situations:

1. List the elements
   1. Outcomes for the Goal Pattern.
   2. Issues and Challenges for the Problem Pattern.
   3. Solution Ideas and Opportunities for the Solution Pattern.
2. Find common themes – across the elements
   1. Goal Themes
   2. Problem Themes and
   3. Solution Themes
3. Find the repeating pattern – across the common themes
   1. Goal Problem
   2. Problem Pattern
   3. Solution Pattern

Here’s a graphical way of presenting the Systemic Thinking Process applied to the GPS:

But, once you know the underlying method this is a simpler diagram:

The method is very robust.  It doesn’t really matter if you go through the three steps for each entity in series – or do each step for all three entities, before moving on to the next step.  (It normally ends up being a mixture, because thinking about one entity leads to ideas on other entities and on potential themes and patterns – and vice versa.)

We called the method Systemic Thinking.  Systemic means “repeating throughput the entire system or situation”, although many people misuse it to denote “to do with systems”.

So Systemic Thinking means thinking in terms of the patterns that repeat situation- or system-wide.

The term SystemIC Thinking is also easily and often confused with SystemS Thinking (thinking about how the parts of a situation or system interact with each other) and SystemATIC Thinking (thinking methodically).

It turns out that some people associate the word systemic with computer systems so we later came up with a more popular name for it: Pattern Thinking.

In the 15 years since the Repeating Patterns discovery and developing the Pattern Thinking Method, we’ve not found a single challenging situation in which there isn’t a single repeating pattern driving and governing performance.

Each and every situation has had a single, simple goal pattern; a single simple problem pattern, governing performance and; a single, simple dramatic improvement solution pattern.  Many companies and individuals have secured significant improvements in bottom-line performance and satisfaction as a result.

Click here for more detail on Systemic Thinking or here if you prefer the Pattern Thinking name.

In the next few posts, I’ll share some GPS examples with you, before returning to the saga of my dramatic improvement journey … as you can imagine, quite a bit has transpired in the 15 years since these discoveries and developments!