Perspectives in systems thinking – part 1

A former colleague of mine, Martin Schmidt, has commented under my last article about simplifying model views. The right level of abstraction is important to communicate to different audiences. And I can’t agree more.

First of all, perspectives are a really interesting thing in systems thinking. It can turn around a model about one thing into something completely different. Just by changing the perspective. And a system has a whole lot of different perspectives to take. More about that later this week.

I learned last year that putting everything about a process into one view results into two things. As author of the model I know a lot about the process for all different roles. The reader in contrast is completely lost. Why was that? The process I was describing is spanning the whole software development life cycle, from ideation to monitoring in production. The amount of different roles involved in this process is a lot. Now as reader of the process, where do you start looking? How can you identify the for you important bits and pieces. Well, when the model doesn’t support different perspectives out of the box, you are lost.

It is of course too complicated to maintain one model for x amount of different roles or perspectives. So it comes down to what Martin wrote. Find a level of abstraction or a way of modeling to help stakeholders with “finding their way” into the system. For me it needed several discussions, different attempts, and a kind of implicit approval to actually remove most of the details from our process model. Now we are about to release something that I hope provides a simpler view for different roles to quickly find their place in the life cycle and then dig deeper where relevant for them.

In general, this is not a new topic for me, and I should have known better. But I tend to forget things over the decades. Until I remember them again. 10+ years ago, when I was leading a small team, my company started building a new product. Partially based on what we already had, and mostly new. My team was struggling a lot with the new product. It was the time when I tried to map out systems with mind maps a lot to help with testing. What I learned rather quickly – even for my standards – was that a mind map has too few dimensions, and it is hard for someone else but the author to read and understand. And of course our system was too complex.
You have to talk people through the structure. When doing that I still had the strong feeling that most of my team had issues understanding my explanations. It was when I tried to approach it differently. They should map out a part of the systems how they see it. Then I can adjust my model to their language and explain things differently.

In systems thinking you can take the perspective from every part and even relation. And the consumer and provider of a system’s model are also just different perspectives. A system can change drastically by the choice of perspective. For all people and roles this can also be viewed as motivation. When you look at a system model from a certain perspective, keep those motivations in mind. They will explain a lot.