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Using systems and habits to improve your life is a proven method to succeed. It requires seeing the work as a system and then adjusting your thoughts and behaviors to be able to take advantage of your opportunities in life.
In systems thinking, speed isn’t looked at the same as in linear thinking. In linear thinking, the faster we can go the better.
The linear thinking goes… if growth in business is good, then faster growth is better; if improving one’s finances are good then gaining money quickly must be better; if getting healthy is good, getting there immediately is better.
Read MoreMany people have felt motivation to change something in their life at one time or another. The desire to correct for a weakness or get better in some area is common.
What also is common is the mistake that we tend to make where we ignore the structures in place and just assume sheer effort will get us there. We think we just need more motivation to find success.
Read MoreFor the latest version of this article, click here.
Read MoreLife is systematic. All around us are systems that impact us. Often, we can’t see the whole system so we just focus on a small portion of the system.
But seeing the larger system can be in way to gain understanding and then know how to move forward to adapt to better fit the system or work to change the system.
Our Emotions Around Seeing Systems for the First Time
When we first start to see the system our emotions tend to run wild. We might get excited, overwhelmed, afraid, and everything in between. It starts to become a brand new way of seeing the world. Suddenly the pieces of the puzzle come together and you realize this whole time the system was always there and always impacting you.
In Presence, by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, the authors talk about this journey of seeing the full system. They explain it through a recent conversation they were having about Senge seeing larger system for the first time. Here is the section that discusses this:
‘“My immediate experience was more of being a victim, because in the moment I couldn’t see any way to influence the system I found myself stuck in. I don’t think that’s uncommon when people first start to see a larger system at play.”
“I think this is because the first awareness of larger forces, or a larger pattern, is just the beginning,” said Otto. “It’s as if we awake to something that’s been going on all around us but that we haven’t seen. Maybe we’ve even subconsciously worked to keep ourselves from seeing it. Then, all of a sudden, we see this larger pattern, and it’s a real ‘Aha!’ By suspending our normal analytic ways of thinking, we allow ourselves to encounter the system directly.”
The authors of the book are experienced systems thinkers but even they realize that seeing the full system isn’t always natural. Humans don’t start by thinking this way. We start with quick, linear thoughts and analysis. This is the major difference between systems thinking and linear thinking.
But taking a step back to envision the full system can be incredibly beneficial. It can give us great insight into seeing a problem with fresh eyes and come up with a solution that understands the full system, rather than one that ignores the larger system.
Quality Control Improvement Example
Here is an example from a recent experience I had at work. We were trying to reduce the time it takes us to do our quality control process. We are a repair center for medical equipment and we have to run the equipment for several hours and then check the levels in order to confirm that the machine is fixed.
This process can be a bit time consuming. About a month ago we started to track the time it takes per unit to complete the quality control process. It seemed to take longer than it should so we wanted to know what we could do to improve the process.
Our quality control person said that he felt the end of the process was very cumbersome and inefficient. This was the part of the process where all the equipment is lined up and we take clear bags to place over the equipment and then place in their respective delivery bins to get sent to customers.
The first few suggestions relied on linear thinking. Some ideas that were thrown out were to stop bagging the equipment or hire someone else to bag it so the QC person doesn’t have to.
But these aren’t good system improvements. By not bagging the equipment for customers, they would receive their equipment back and it wouldn’t have the same experience of receiving a clean, bagged machine. This would hurt our customer’s experience with us in order to be slightly more efficient.
Having someone else bag the units just meant that we shift the inefficiency to a different person. We don’t really solve for it we just have someone else do that part. The time would still be spent doing that.
Finally we started to realize that we needed to improve the bagging process. We realized the bags were in the QC space but the completed units were usually moved and lined up in another section.
This meant that the QC person had to grab 60-70 bags from the roller, tear them off, tear them apart individually, walk them over to the line of units, place a bag on each unit, then go one-by-one and open each bag and place it over the machine.
The solution we came up with was to move the roll of bags to the other section. This meant that the QC person could simply add the bag as they lined up the units. The roll had all the bags in the same order with the opening coming off the roll first. The QC person can simply pull the bag right from the roll to the unit.
Many people felt that this wouldn’t make a difference. It didn’t seem like a major change and they couldn’t understand how this would help in any way. So we measured it.
We took the average time that it took prior to making the change and compared it to the time per unit after the change. What we found was that we reduced the average time per unit from 4.9 minutes per unit to 3.6 minutes per unit! This reduced the time per unit by almost a minute and a half.
Since we have 60-90 units per day go through QC, we now saved a couple hours a day with this change. The QC person can now move on to other duties much quicker than he could before. This had a major impact on our operations and helped us become more efficient.
Switching from Credit to Debit
Improvements that come from seeing the full system don’t just have to be at work. Our personal lives are full of areas that can be improved with a little systems thinking.
A few years after college I found myself in debt. I started a business right out of college and racked up some credit card debt while I got it going. At one point I picked up some additional work and thought it would be easy to finally pay off the debt.
But after a few months I found something interesting. Instead of paying off my debt I was adding to it faster than normal. “This can’t be,” I thought. “I make more now so why am I not seeing my balances go down?”
What I realized was that I was used to spending more than I could afford. It became easy to throw purchases on the credit card and worry about them later. I was always justifying a business purchase as one I needed to make.
I started realizing that I didn’t really need the things I convinced myself that I needed. I really needed a better way to decide to buy something or not.
I tried many different approaches and some worked and some didn’t. One that had a drastic impact was to switch from using the credit cards to make purchases to using cash or debit card. This forced me to consider the impact on my accounts and my budget. I would have to keep all receipts and log them in a checking account excel spreadsheet that I created.
Suddenly the new equipment, drinks with a client, or even the daily lunch weren’t a “need to have”. They became “nice to have” and many times, unnecessary. I paid more attention to where my money went and wouldn’t spend money as recklessly as I did when I just put it on the credit card.
By switching to a new system for spending money I was able to get rid of all my credit card debt (over $10,000) in a little over a year. And this gave me a new system that I could continue to improve and evolve to better fit my lifestyle and assure myself that I wouldn’t have credit card debt again. I still use the excel spreadsheet to this day and have found it crucial to being able to balance a family budget to make sure money goes where it is needed and not wasted.
This represents seeing the full system and then finding elements of that system that can be changed and improved. Initially when I increased my income I thought linearly that my debt would automatically decrease. I assumed the higher income would automatically go towards paying off my balance. When this didn’t happen I needed to see the full system and then tweak aspects of the system in order to fix the problems of the system.
Stop Projecting Your Habitual Assumptions
In Presence, the authors do a great job to emphasize the value of systems thinking. They state, “Learning to see begins when we stop projecting our habitual assumptions and start to see reality freshly. It continues when we can see our connection to that reality more clearly.”
Instead of relying your habitual assumptions, start to explore the full systems that exist. They often go unnoticed in an attempt to quickly move forward but many times seeing the full system shows us a fresh reality that we can then adjust and improve, as we desire.
There are three elements to a strong system. First, it has to be simple. Second, it has to be sticky. Third, it has to be self-regulating.
Simplicity is a key to a system being able to sustain because the more complex it is the more likely steps will be forgotten or skipped. If it is complex, it may never even get going because the complexity would be a deterrent for someone trying to take on the system.
Read MoreEach time there is a deadly mass shooting in the United States, we get a sense of the larger systems at play with regards to guns. Some will point to an aspect of the system and feel they have a solution. Some will defend their position. Some will work to use the event for political gain.
The systems in the United States around guns are incredibly complex and deeply ingrained in the various beliefs people have. This makes a simple, linear solution impossible.
Read MoreThe way we approach new goals and dreams, in many ways, reflects how we feel about learning. The parallels between the two can shed light on ways we might be sabotaging our efforts to improve.
In Presence, by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, the authors state that, “When we’re learning something new, we can feel awkward, incompetent and even foolish. It’s easy to convince ourselves that it’s really not so important after all to incorporate the new – and so we give up.”
Read MoreIn life there are numerous things that we want to change. Many times we want change to happen for us, fitting neatly in the exact way that fits us best.
But if there is change that we desire, we can’t just sit idly by and hope others do it for us. We have to find a way to move from saying we should change something to actually changing it.
Read MoreI used to think that to improve meant that you had to have some negative emotion that you were trying to correct. In other words, there has to be something that you don’t like in order to work hard to change something.
Years ago I came across the Yerkes-Dodson curve. The Yerkes-Dodson curve shows that as arousal and anxiety increase our performance increases up to a point and then decreases as we add more arousal or anxiety.
Read MoreOur society likes to make assumptions about the effort one makes towards a goal. We see a tennis player win a tournament and say their effort is what made it happen.
Or we see a scientific discovery and assume their effort in thinking through the problem was the key factor that allowed them to succeed.
Read MoreIn college I was struggling with a problem that I eventually solved in a way that made that problem obsolete in the future. It seemed like a problem that I had to solve over and over until I used a simple, systematic way to make sure the problem never came back up.
That is the benefit of systems thinking to solve problems and reach goals. It extends beyond the specific problem you are facing right now and provides long-term solutions that can eliminate similar problems coming up in the future.
Read MoreWhenever we set a goal, there is a surge of excitement and motivation around that goal. We can visualize the accomplishment of the goal.
This might provide a spark of motivation and hope but it also tends to gloss over the path to success. It minimizes the difficult work ahead.
Read MoreThe other day I was listening to a speaker that I really admire and they were talking about goals. They talked about sitting down and setting over one hundred goals.
They talked about how important it was to do this and how most people never write down any goals, which means they keep them in the wish arena rather than concrete goals.
Read MoreMany years ago I falsely believed that in order to improve, we have to have a hole in us that we strive to fill. We have to be unhappy in order to push harder to get better.
I assumed that being happy meant that we didn’t need to work any longer, that we must have arrived. Seeing individuals at the top of their fields who continued to work must mean that they deny themselves happiness in an attempt to gain more success.
Read MoreWe all want better things in our lives. Whether we just want more of something, or we want an improvement in something, we want to see things get better.
It might be that we look at the government and hope it can improve to better fit our beliefs. It might be that we want our boss to stop nagging us and let us do whatever we think is best at the time.
Read MoreA lot of times when people that I talk to struggle with their goals, we find that one of the best ways to get past that struggle is to change the timeframe in which they view those goals.
We have all probably heard someone say they are going to do something great with their life. They go on and on and then you come to find out that they haven’t done any of the hard work yet. They have only spent time dreaming about what it will be like after they do the work.
Read MoreHave you ever wanted to change something so bad that you couldn’t imaging wanting that change more than you do right now? You felt passionate, motivated and invincible. But then over time you slowly fell back into your old habits and routines and the drive for change slowly evaporated.
Most people that I know rarely change. They remain relatively the same throughout their lives.
Read MoreFor the latest version of this article, click here.
Read MoreI’ve written several articles on linear thinking versus systems thinking and one of the things I say is that human thinking is flawed. We tend to miss the full system and instead we look to understand the whole by only seeing a small part.
In How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, the author explores this idea further. The brain expert examines how we make decisions and why we decide what we decide.
Read MoreMany people think of self-improvement and assume it just means some sort of self-help for those with problems. They think of psychologists psychoanalyzing patients or touchy feely books about loving yourself.
Years ago I stumbled upon some books that looked at self-improvement differently. One of the first books that I read related to this was Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. This was the first time I broke away from thinking that anything related to self-improvement must just be for those with problems and realized that everyone could look to improve.
Read More