Perspectives in systems thinking, again – part 2
I want to spend another post on perspectives, as it is such a valuable, yet difficult topic. Perspective is the magic behind empathy. Perspective helps you to get better in understanding your environment. My wife must already be very annoyed with me. Sometimes she and basically everyone, just wants to have an opinion on something. Keeping it simple. Letting off steam. Having something weird to tell. Often I ask her why she thinks the other person might think that way. Taking different perspectives and motivations is difficult.
When I was talking about systems thinking with Vernon some months ago, he raised the question what to do when you encounter a complex situation. Or rather it was along the line, what to do with it to make is simpler again. I had to think quite a while about it. Systems thinking is an approach to understand the system at hand, not to make it simpler. To make it simpler, or rather find out, if you can make it simpler again, you first need to understand the system. Find the simple rules, find the relevant parts, find the connections, and find the motivations. Then you can decide which parts, rules and connections to remove. Taking different perspectives is vital in this part.
A process might include roles A, B and C. There is a strong dependency on some information that A and B need to provide, that C needs. Without seeing the motivation of C, you might wonder, if it is really relevant for A and B to provide the information. To take an abstract example from the world of IT. We are working Agile, so we use Jira. A Jira ticket in our system has many custom fields to fill out that expect partially hard to understand information. It is easy to loose the overview. When you don’t know that downstream of the development life cycle certain Jira queries (JQLs) are used to extract information from the tickets to report a relevant element of the system, you don’t see much sense in some of the fields. Some fields are used to derive other decisions from them. Not obvious to spot in some cases.
For me as team member these information on the ticket are irrelevant. Can’t we just drop them? But not so fast. So, let’s take a journey and take the perspective of the Jira ticket. When you have moved the ticket to “done”, it might not be the end of the process for the ticket. Think about release processes, regression testing, future changes, or simply reporting. Only with the full picture you can decide if some of the fields don’t need to be filled out anymore. Or maybe you can consult some late ticket consumers that there are more efficient ways to get those information. For this you need to take the perspective of other roles involved in the process and their motivations.
Understanding how to take different perspectives helps with gaining better insights in seemingly chaotic situations. Let’s quickly look at the simplicity and complexity of an American football game. For many Americans and people who grew up with football I would assume the game is kind of obvious. For most Europeans it is just a bunch of people piling up onto each other. It is so complicated to observe, as every play is different from the one before. There is no real flow over the course of a game, it is many small flows. It’s a choreography of the offense, that the defense tries to destroy. 11 people on each side acting rather individually and yet as a whole. There are shared and group individual rules to follow.
This comes back to the ant hill comparison of last week. There are simple rules underneath, but the amount of individuals is just too much for many observers. Every player follows special rules and motivations. To understand one play you need to quickly jump from perspective to perspective, player to player, and guess what their individual intention and intention as a group is or was. Receivers running pass or block routes, defense players covering zones, line men blocking in different directions. This is complex and for people invested in watching a game on that level rather exhausting. For the others it’s just people piling up onto each other once or twice a minute.
Often I reach the limit of imagination or mix up too many information to actually take another perspective. For example, there are some political discussions that returning to atomic power plants is the way forward for Germany’s power supply. This opinion seems to be shared by a significant enough number of people to bring it to the attention of the media. So I was trying, actually a few times, to understand what the arguments of the proponents supporting this stance is. Maybe I have “just enough” more information, that it is too hard for me to understand any of the arguments of the “other” side. Maybe I have different or wrong information and am not aware of them. Why are they ignoring these aspects? Do they know about these other information and explicitly devalue them? Often it’s very simple on this level. Follow the money! In that case I don’t even understand what motivation might be behind it, as not even the prospect of earning money seems to be relevant to the usual suspects.
Now I have done something that I hate at some conference talks. When the talk takes 1-3 key messages and repeats them over and over again to fill half an hour. In this case I have used three examples to explain the same topic. My perspective is that some readers might get the one or the other example easier. I hope that makes sense from your perspective as well.
