Understanding Systems Thinking
This article explains how to develop systems thinking and gain systemic insights. I take a human systems approach to enable you to look at the linkages between family upbringing, rejection, acceptance and financial principles that are embedded in value systems.
Understanding Systems Thinking starts with noticing our own patterns of belonging.
There is a lot that we do in our lives professionally and personally, that replicates the unconscious patterns that have been built up in our childhoods. Belonging is very important, and even when we think we are different, we are often unconsciously seeking to work with people who operate from similar unconscious rules of behaviour. Thus, the fact is, that we often choose who we are going to spend time with in organisational life, based on our own patterns of who is similar to us. This extends all the way up to those who are invited to be on the board of an organisation.
It is easy to criticise people for being in ‘FaceBook’ bubbles. Yet we all have strong unconscious drivers that affect how we work or volunteer, or become board members with organisations. Each one of these decisions is likely to give us environments that have a sense of similarity like a family. Hence we ‘fit in’.
All of this is natural human behaviour and is part of what can create the glue in a culture of an organisation.
Understanding Systems Thinking to spot the unconscious group rules that affect your organisations culture.
Using systems theory, you can spot how these patterns create rules for the systems that you're in.
In this article I explain how you can spot these unconscious processes and how this can help you develop better governance. Better governance is always done by maximising the diversity of thinking that is governing the organisational purpose.
This is part of my series of articles helping you understand governance as a dynamic, exciting set of practices that enable us all to co-create organisations (businesses) that are forces for good.
My call to action for this article encompasses a number of things. apart from
learning systemic thinking, is to
considering doing a full governance perspective audit
developing best practice for board recruitment leading to excellent boards.
And/or, buy this cracking book, one of my favourites, that I’m always loaning out to longstanding coaching clients.
Lets take 1 example of a powerful unconscious rule that binds together a system.
A very simple example in my family of origin system was governed by an overall phrase of:
‘never a lender or borrower be’.
In my experience it is a powerful phrase. The meaning I took from it, re-enforced by behaviours and other phrases in my family of origin, was that if you ended up having to borrow you were a failure, and if you were asked to lend, then you are doing something wrong. So there is a whole economic value system, and value judgement system hidden in this phrase.
Alongside the phrase came family behaviours like not giving money to each other, not loaning without charging interest, being charged rent for staying at home from age 18, disparaging comments about family members who were in debt, giving in a patronising trickle down way to charities or via the church. The sanctions that kept the rule active were communications like ‘well you know how anxious x y z family member is about money’ or simply refusing to speak about wealth and economics as though its a dirty word. Anyway these types of behaviours were ‘norms’, just part of what my family and those around my family seemed to operate with. As a family member growing up the assumption about this norm, was that it contained good wisdom and insights that are useful.
Exactly the kind or wisdom and insights that can help one in the tricky world of business and organisational governance.
The thing about systems, especially complex systems, is that we can keep the uncomfortable stuff in the unconscious. In large systems, we can always create an ‘other group’, a sense that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’. And so in organisational life we can quietly blame managers to not be like us, or blame workers to not be like us, or funders to not be like us, or competitors to not be like us….. and so we can continue to re-enforce the unconscious rules of who ‘we’ are, and that is all very good for our identity and sense of belonging. Its also good for our brand and our strategy, so its also very very logical.
Yet, at the same time, we are humans, we are animals, and we are often searching at the unconscious level for a sense of belonging driven by ideas of who ‘we’ are and where I belong in. One of strongest forces for attraction is to search people who have that same unconscious rule in their family systems.
And so, that creates a sense of sameness and also choice about ethics.
By going with a sense of the unconscious ethics that we learnt in our family of origin, like this example of ‘never a lender or borrower be’, we can find people who will keep us safe, they will uphold our sense of morals and behave roughly the same when it comes to business.
Research show that mostly our values don’t change across our life. In fact, in recruitment science, values based recruitment is in vogue precisely because it is proven to give you a high level of predictive validity. Especially for how people will respond at times of crisis.
Part of why our value based rules don't change much is because values are often used as a way of regulating the unconscious and the strain that we might feel if we’ve gone too far from what has been embedded in us.
Systems thinking enables you to notice the unconscious rules that are affecting all sorts of practice?
The point I want to emphasis is that spotting these kind of unconscious group rules, are amazingly insightful for learning to notice systemic forces and factors.
The skills of noticing the forces and factors at work across systems are exactly what is needed in order to contribute to good governance and responsible leadership.
In ethical practice, you to want to learn systemic and systematic thinking, to be able to spot your own unconscious drivers that lead you to repeat the same patterns.
We don’t want people in leadership, or governance, who are not aware of the ethics that are unconsciously ruling their system choices. This is what review after review has been shown to lead to systemic blindness, business failure, oppression, sins of commission and sins of omission.
Just to illustrate this, at the ugly level, what we have in shocking scandals like the Maxwell case linked to the Prince Andrew case is a whole set of links to the private boarding school systems. (And other places of ‘In’ group privileged dynamics) Which are linked to some of the leaders of the Saudi and African world and the sort of interconnection of the public school tie brigade. Much of which has now been proven to be unconsciously self serving of the group rules.
If you want to look at the ugly side of this in terms of our current lack of leadership to do with Putin, you can see how this system is operating in the following satirical comedy video by Johnathan Pie about how Putin’s system is connected to Britain and is therefore one of the systemic reasons why Britain isn’t doing much about the war. Watch video here.
We all have our ‘Tribes’. Yet this is no excuse for lack of systemic and systematic thinking.
The Meaning of the term Logical Family - to me.
Logical family was a term used in the trans movement in the seventies, to help people really realise that their family of origin might not be their biological family and that actually they have a logical family of people who value trans people. Therefore there is nothing wrong with calling and behaving like family, brothers, sisters, mothers etc. So that really helped, that whole welcoming and support to realise they have a logical family.
However I should also point out that there are also other ways by which the unconscious attraction dynamics catch us out. For example the ugly side of the ‘logical family’ dynamic for me are the Boris Johnson brigade. Because the experience of being sent to boarding schools at such a young age does also send a sub-conscious message from your parents that they don’t want you in their lives any more, it can be easy to be unconsciously caught up in the search to re-create your sense of family by finding belonging with other people who are also rejected by their parents. So its easy to find alignment with the logical family of other people who have the same Bollinger club or whatever it is, as they feel similar to ones family of origin, ones tribe.
This is one of the reasons why the private/boarding public school system underpins such inequality in (not Great) Britain. Certainly Public school groupings of privilege are good enough to keep you earning your millions or billions, and others from this tribe might ‘look out for you’, ‘help you with a leg up’. In this sense most parents spending lots of money on their childrens ‘education’ know they are buying in to a system of privilege. Which will also teach your kids ‘how we do things around here’. Such as rules of ‘neither a lender or borrower be’ or other cultural norms.
I should point out, to be clear, that the same process apply to people in Scotland attracted unconsciously to the tribe of Hib’s, Heart’s, Celtic, Rangers and all sorts of ‘tribes’ in society. The point of my article, is to help you analyse your positions and think about the diversity of thinking in your business, particularly about diversity in governance. The more diversity of thinking you can build in to your governance processes the more resilient and sustainable your business will be against shocks to the system.
To behave very similarly to your family of origin and that sort of unconscious similarity provides the comfort, reduces distress and enables relaxed concentration.
On the other hand, because it is often an unconscious process of ‘othering’ others, it can also be a process of wilful blindness, where you can end up colluding with processes that carry out bullying and ‘othering’ of those who don’t fit the desired behaviours. Mostly this will happen via the micro-behaviours of exclusion, the symbols that make it clear that people who don’t behave like the chief ‘in’ group, are the problem.
When it comes to the subject of such strong words as ‘bullying’, schools can provide suitable places for distressed and pernicious children to persecute others and for the common pattern of bullies to bully other people in order to deflect attention from being bullied, or also just to prove that they are in the in-group. Plus, of course, boarding school provides the perfect place for continuing to know that you have a place in society through the boarding school system and the family buy-into that system. Very often it is a wider family system buy in, a whole grouping of social circles who talk about which schools to send their children to, and believe that only those schools on the list are any good.
The perpetuation of these dynamics - of first of all feeling being rejected by your family of origin - unconsciously or consciously by being sent to boarding school so young, is salved, or assuaged, so that it doesn’t feel so painful by the sense of belonging you feel by discovering your wider ‘logical tribe’.
Why this matters to your organisation and your governance practice?
I think the logical family idea is a great way of thinking systemically about your own organisations, your management teams, your leadership teams, the boards that you join. It helps you think about what behaviours do those memberships give you that reinforces your sense of logical family.
You can find yourself, willing to join in with a tribe, even if you know at the same time that being part of that tribe is part of the system that's killing the planet. And so, the reality is that you can tolerate being part of a system of people like us, even though you might have a declared conscious goal of saving the planet.
Because membership of group is a very important part of the human species and we are ultimately pack animals. We don't like to think we are animals, let alone thinking that we're pack animals, but a lot has been proven about that in the neuroscience of coaching and Tavistock Group Relations research.
The great news is that through good supervision, coaching and through consciously recruiting for diversity of thinking, you can mitigate against these biases. You can build in systems of human diversity that create resilience and sustainable decision making. You can build in the appropriate level of discord and disagreement that helps you make better decisions, rather than quick and easy decisions that so often lead to failure. (Need i point to Boris again?!!)
So, how do you change that?
Well, I help people change that to help organisations to make this cultural change. I find some organisations make huge headway at cleaning out the unconscious processes that have caught them in traps.
The implications for this in your workplaces are that there will be systems that you avoid because you don't trust them at a fundamental level, driven by your unconscious. Plus, there will be other systems that you feel naturally at home with and get unconsciously attracted to because they feel familiar and your gut knows the rules and you understand the norms which govern the way the system operates. This has significant implications for how we lead and influence change.
This article is about explaining this insight, so that you, the reader, do the work of noticing your patterns, use your reflective journaling and take up coaching, consultancy or facilitation to support you and your teams to explore the way the patterns affect your business.
I know your business is and can be even more a force for good in the world. Yet so often, in my coaching and consultancy experience, I come across passionate individuals and great organisations who are not fulfilling their potential. It is my work to support the strategic intentions that you have declared and to gently but firmly enable you to understand when you are being held back. Often, it can be ourselves and our own cultural dynamics which limit our abilities.
How this works?
A simple example of an unconscious rule for a system would be a family system that has a core phrase of 'never a lender or a borrower be'. It’s a common phrase, yet there are some families where this phrase is used tirelessly, and where moaning is frowned upon.
Such a family background could be said to be applying an 'ethical principle' for how to live a 'good life'. It might be the pattern that family members who don't follow this rule get shunned. Perhaps there will also be stories about what happened to the 'lender or borrower' that reinforce how destructive being a lender or borrower can be?
Anyway, you get the picture - little phrases that are then reinforced with behaviour and stories from those adults around you in your upbringing.
So what can this lead to?
People with this phrase as a strong rule will search people for other people who have that same phrase rule. They will feel more comfortable with team members who are equally disliking borrowing or lending. They will like departments and projects that operate with this rule and might even enforce this rule even when borrowing or lending is a logical thing to do in relation to the strategy.
And so, following this rule co-creates sameness, an ethical principle in common. You can relate to others and feel you can trust their decision-making. It is also choice (albeit it will often be a hidden choice), so you will end up selecting or promoting others with the same ethical principle.
An important second conclusion - an alternative systemic way of thinking that saves the planet.
Systemically we all need to be now thinking and behaving with the insights of 7 generations hence. For too long it is clear that our society is orientated around the values of NOW, and part of how we have been killing the planet and every species with us, is to do with our wilful neglect of thinking about the future.
Yet there is another way.
In Native American culture they are famous for making decisions based on 7 generational thinking. In this book, The Dawn of Everything by David Greyber and David Wengrow that my wife bought me for Christmas, it talks about how at the practice level this translates into a system where by if someone has committed a crime it is the intergenerational group that are called to account by society. It is the curiosity of asking ‘how did this happen that this person committed a crime?’, What and who else is part of the behavioural patterns that have co-created this to be happening? And so a process of what we might call Truth and Restorative Justice is sought.
As a Quaker, I experience the power of community, and the importance of meetings for discernment. We call them meetings for clearness. It is a practice, which we practice, as a community, seeking to freely help each other with some of the painful, complex decisions in life and in business decisions.
There are many ‘refugee’s’ in Quakers. Some are refugees fleeing from other churches, some are refugees who are gay, trans, of a different country, colour or belief from the mainstream in society. We hold together as a system, thinking carefully and feeling deeply, hoping we are making right decisions as we go about our business as Quakers. Sometimes great truths come out of Quaker processes. Generally we operate as a ‘Logical Family’.