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Tom Gladwin Leaders Should Be Systems Thinkers

Let’s step back and look at how the world has been changing. It’s getting increasingly complex, and by that we mean a variety of different complexities. One is a dynamic complexity where cause and effect are increasingly separated in time and place, which makes it difficult because we don’t have immediate feedback. Like, you probably don’t know where your shoes were made and how they were made, right?

We also have growing social complexity on this planet, with billions of people now connected by cell phones and Facebook and computers, such that for any corporate decision now, more and more stakeholders are watching it, monitoring it, reporting about it. So decision making has become a lot more complex.

A third type of complexity is what you call generative complexity. And that means that our toolkit of the past for solving problems is almost obsolete. And climate change is a great example of that. We just don’t know how to do it.

So we have a world that’s growing increasingly complex. Second, we have a world that’s becoming increasingly uncertain. Because of connectivity, because of extreme events, it’s becoming less able to predict how this world is evolving. Nassim Taleb’s book on the black swan, and his new book on antifragile, try to make that case that we just can’t predict anymore, and we better be able to explore plausible, possible, multiple outcomes in any situation.

And thirdly, the world is speeding up. So the power of velocity, the exponential pace of change. So any corporate decision maker is now confronted with extraordinary complexity, hyperconnectivity, massive uncertainty, and massive velocity. So our old techniques of trying to understand things is no longer working.

So a systems thinker looks at the whole system rather than the parts. A systems thinker looks at the nonlinear relationships rather than what we’ve been taught and trained, in terms of linear relationships where cause and effect are proportionate. A systems thinker looks at the long term rather than the short term. A systems thinker looks at the interrelationships rather than just the things that are part of the actual system. A systems thinker knows that the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, because complex adaptive systems have emergent properties that the parts do not have. So that’s why all of the rules of the scientific revolution of understanding the world in a reductionist, mechanistic way no longer work. We need to think very, very differently.

Now, as it turns out, children are wonderful systems thinkers. Most children sleep with teddy bears and dogs and cats. They’re connected to nature. They’re always searching for patterns and relationships. But in Western societies, when we put those kids into school, that is pounded out of them in favor of going back to a reductionist approach.

So, as kind of a general conclusion, most of the world’s great psychologists and educators now believe that systems thinking is the number one cognitive and perceptual skill for the future, if you’re going to be an outstanding leader.