Systems Seeing Adventure – Day 5: Attending (more) Closely

If you want to know more about the System Seeing Adventure, check out this link.

My TL;DR: of this session is: What seems simple is rather complex, if you only look close enough.

Today’s task was to look at a picture and note what we see. The system and the interactions. How is it communicated and conveyed.

The picture to look at can be found here. I will post you a picture of my notes at the bottom. You can probably not read too much about it. But I will add my notes here.

The first thing that I noticed was the beautiful tetraptych on the top, setting the flow of the story. The four pictures start the flow of water. A hand is opening a faucet to fill a kettle with hot water.

Steam evaporates from the kettle. Evaporated water builds clouds. When clouds are saturated it starts to rain. Rain hits the ground. Water flows into a river. Water vanishes from the river by seepage through layers in the river bed. The river hits a reservoir. What I think is a water tower, the water is distributed through pipe systems of larger size into a pipe system of a smaller size, and out of another faucet again.

Speaking with the language of Donella H. Meadows as I told you shortly on Day 3 of the adventure, I see a lot of stocks, inflows and outflows.

The flow is meandering over the page from right to left and left and right like a river flows through the landscape.

It combines human-made systems (faucet, water reservoir and pipes) with natural systems (clouds, rain, river).

And one last observation was, that 15 minutes pass quickly when you pay attention to something and dive deeper into it.

My friend Vernon is also doing the challenge and he wrote about it on LinkedIn.

He first noticed that the image was in black & white. A detail I have completely missed.

As one of the first examples in Thinking in Systems: A primer, by Donella H. Meadows is thinking about a bath tub, I approached this challenge not entirely impartial. It’s ten years since I read the book, but the water flow example is one of the best entry topics to systems thinking that I know of, and it stuck with me.

Take a bath tub or the gutter of a house and think about all the elements, the stocks, the inflows and outflows. Think about the whole and its parts. The relations and perspectives. And where does the system has its boundaries?

Time for a cup of tea!