A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something . These systems must be comprised of three things: <ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Elements </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Interconnections </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Function/purpose</li></ul>

What Is A System?

<ol><li>Elements of your digestive system include teeth, enzymes, stomach, & intestines. The function of this system is to break down food into its basic nutrients & transfer it into the bloodstream while discarding the waste. </li><li>A football team is a system with elements such as players, coach, field, & ball. Its interconnections are the rules of the game, the coach's strategy, the players' communications, & the laws of physics that govern the motions of ball & players. Its purpose is to win, have fun, make money, get exercise or all of the above. </li></ol>

Examples Of A System 

<ol><li>Can you identify parts?</li><li>Do the parts affect each other?</li><li>Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?</li><li>Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances? </li></ol>

How To Spot A System 

A stock is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the events of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time. Stocks change over time due to the actions of a flow. Flows are filling & draining, bidirectional outcome cycles. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

Stocks & Flows  

Systems thinkers use graphs of system behavior to understand trends over time, rather than focusing attention on individual events. We also use behavior-over-time graphs to learn whether the system is approaching a goal or limit, and if so, how quickly. The variable on the graph is often a stock or a flow.

Reading Systems 

A stock takes time to change, because a flow takes time to flow

Changes In Stocks & Flows

Change how you see your organizational structure 

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Thinking in Systems

<ul><li>Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever.</li><li>Technological augmentation, atomization and automation mean you must upskill and reskill for the future.</li><li>Don’t tether your identity to your job; rather, think in terms of skills.</li><li>Businesses must change their focus from extracting value to creating new value through learning.</li><li>“Silicon cognition” cannot replace the “organic cognition” humans have evolved over 3.8 million years.</li><li>Hiring only the best might result in top performers turning on one another.</li><li>Culture and capacity define the workplace.</li></ul>

Key Takeaways From The Book

The world is undergoing three “climate changes” – in the environment, in the market and in technology – which are forcing people to become more adept at adapting. Jobs change so quickly that your current job may not exist in 18 to 24 months. Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely transform 100 percent of jobs in 10 years. The world is on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which cyber and biological systems will combine to create a completely digital economy.

The Big Change

Market climate change is on the horizon. Currency, collaboration and contracts, among other transactions, will all become digital and move at the speed of light.The three climate changes will reshape ethics, community, geopolitics, politics, work and education. A “left” and “right” political choice will give way to governments that are responsive, adaptable and swift. People may feel changes within the realm of work most keenly, because work is very personal: It provides people with a sense of identity and purpose. The straight line from education to career to retirement will disappear.

No More Straight Line Career Paths

Three forces drive work in the modern age: Automation – This work is repetitive, inexpensive, low complexity and of lesser value.Atomization – Predictable and discrete, this work is medium cost and of moderate complexity and value. Human and Augmentation – This work is ambiguous, complex, higher cost and of greater value.Computers have transformed humanity’s relationship with physical labour.  Algorithms will “unbundle” complex jobs into component parts. They can then automate or atomize these parts and distribute them to the cloud where humans will compete for them.

Upskilling And Reskilling For The Future

Companies that were once “containers” for jobs will become “platforms” that combine human and technological know-how. They will require five types of talent:“Foundational” – People who operate a company.“Rotational” – People who do work required only periodically.“Contingent” – People who do work specific to a specialized need.“Transformational” – People who help a company navigate change or develop strategy.“Executive” – People who organize other talent for a company or an event.

The Future Of Jobs

Young graduates can expect to work in 17 different jobs during their lifetimes. Don’t ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, ask what they want to do. Children need to learn how to adapt, build resilience and cultivate agency. By the time students finish university, the career they want may not exist or may have changed dramatically.Whatever you do now unless you are closing in on your target retirement years, is unlikely to be your last job.

Not Jobs, But Skills

Kids need foundational knowledge that helps them put data in context. They also require fundamental literacies in traditional reading and quantitative skills, digital intelligence, creativity and collaboration. The popular online learning site Khan Academy, for example, organizes students by independence instead of age. By untethering learning from preconceived identities, youth will become more adaptable. Young people must understand identity as a constant negotiation between internal beliefs and observations and social and cultural forces.

Kids Learning In A New Way

Open and connected systems help learners recognize the signals of change and respond appropriately. These systems encapsulate three organizational learning generations. <ul><li>The first focuses on acquiring knowledge and storing expertise. </li><li>The second observes product life cycles and optimizes for efficiency, while simultaneously anticipating new iterations. </li><li>The third encompasses the autonomous learning loop in which the learning rate accelerates and builds new efficiencies and iterations in real time. </li></ul>

The Three Learning Generations

The “S-Curve” macro-process demonstrates the learning generations in four stages: Explore, Experiment, Execute and Expand.During third-generation acceleration, the first two phases, Explore and Experiment, occur more frequently than during the Execute and Expand phases. Design thinking helps because it grants companies deeper understanding and problem-solving capacities and builds user empathy and solution matching practices. It places the user at the centre.

The S-Curve Macro

In the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in future, they’ll be about the heart.

The new work environment requires soft skills – such as working well with others. Employees must also possess less obvious capacities such as a willingness to learn and a capacity for understanding their purpose within the larger organizational framework. In a world where “the pivot is the new business model,” mental agility, feeling safe admitting ignorance and monitoring self-awareness are no longer optional, but vital. Workers must have social and emotional intelligence, creative thinking, communication and judgement skills, along with “sensemaking” ability and empathy.

The Job Requirements Of The Upcoming Era

People differ from animals by their “pedagogical learning stance:” an ability to take what they have learned and apply it to different situations and problems. Continuous learning and disruption is uniquely human and enables people to adapt to changing circumstances. Humans are creative, generate ideas, make connections between unrelated phenomena and see things from different points of view.

“Silicon Cognition” Cannot Replace the “Organic Cognition” of Humans

The days when the shareholder is king and workers are merely a cost that companies seek to minimize are almost over. Maniacal reliance on quarterly earnings is a poor long-term strategy for any enterprise. Leaders need to be more mindful about where they lead their people and how. The idea that a leader’s job is to extract value from processes and people is phasing into Fourth Industrial Revolution reliance on adaptability and learning faster than your competition.

Leaders Must Adapt To The New World

From a group of three people, one is randomly selected to lead. They receive four cookies to share. Each takes a cookie. Almost every time, the leader took the remaining cookie. When a person feels powerful, they stop caring what people think and lose their sense of empathy, fairness and collaboration. It is not surprising, therefore, that CEOs consistently score lower on Emotional Intelligence (EQ) tests.Leaders must learn to let go of the cookie.

Experiment 1: The Cookie Monster

An evolutionary biologist tested a strategy for producing the most eggs from the best laying hens among nine flocks by putting the best together in one cage. Of the nine top producers, only three survived, having pecked the others to death. The better option: spreading out all the hens from the highest-producing cages. Within a few generations, egg-laying improved 160% and no hens murdered another. The lesson? Searching for the “best” candidates from the “best” schools and making them compete for the highest-ranking positions guarantees counterproductive conflicts.

Experiment 2: The Super Chicken Paradox

Instead of focusing on what your company produces, focus on the conditions in which you create and produce. These conditions are culture and capacity. Culture is a sense of purpose and value and which companies create either intentionally or accidentally. Workplaces with intentional cultures offer benefits that mirror company values.Accidental culture occurs when culture evolves without intention and almost always proves toxic. Every great culture has a sense of purpose that the company and its leaders must model daily. Identify and eliminate anything anti-culture.

Culture and Capacity Define the Workplace

Capacity is a company’s ability to respond to opportunities. Shifts in context help businesses acknowledge their biases. By nurturing a working environment which bolsters capacity, companies can learn from, and seize the opportunities presented by these bias-busting moments. The technology used to be something you learned to use to do your job. Increasingly, technology and people learn from one another.If culture is the heart of a company, capacity is its brain.

Understanding Capacity

The job description and organizational chart no longer matter. Fit springs from aspirations, not qualifications. Hire people for their capacity to learn, rather than for what they already know. Companies might resemble film and television projects, bringing people in for a limited period of time to perform certain tasks. They can apply what they learn from that experience to their next “tour.”

A good job posting should start with a description of your organization. Describe the ideal candidate, not the job. Explain how you want the applicant to embrace the job. Building adaptive teams means embracing adaptive hiring strategies. The best leaders hire for mission and mindset but can be uncomfortable with people who think differently than they do. Cherish alternative points of view; they bring cognitive diversity to your organization.

The Job Posting Ad

Build adaptive teams that are purpose-built to deal with a particular challenge or goal. For example, a team could have specialists – engineers, designers, project handlers – who rotate frequently, and a research group that scans the horizon for new opportunities. Your teams need “clear eyes focused on an unclear horizon” while leaders raise the bar to meet new expectations. How can leaders encourage fearlessness when the future is so uncertain? Pay attention. Let go. Move fast. Make the future what you want it to be.

Adaptive Teams

McGowan and Shipley posit a future in which humans share knowledge and build meaningful workplace cultures.

A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential—if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a "good job" looks like. Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities—and help our organizations do the same. Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety—despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.

Stashed ideas

The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work

Upward of 30% of our time at work is spent in meetings. That’s a significant chunk of time, but it shouldn’t be too alarming.After all, meetings are vitally important to the success of any organization. Presidents and their cabinet members decide whether or not to go to war in meetings. CEOs and their board of directors choose whether to expand into new markets or shut down a regional branch in meetings. Meetings are the lifeblood of every organization.Yet the paradox of meetings is that we generally don’t like them. In fact, some of us despise them.

Meetings: The Necessary Evil

<ul><li>Too many meetings are just plain boring. They’re tedious and uninspired.</li><li>The leader is too focused on agendas and ending on time to notice a lack of engagement.</li><li>Most meetings have an aftertaste of being drained.</li><li>The worst part of participating in a mind numbing meeting is the lack of a commensurate return. This contempt festers when we invest time and energy into an activity that drives insufficient clarity or resolution.</li></ul>

Meetings Are Boring And Ineffective

We can sit at attention silently for hours in a dark theatre, but somehow can’t make it through a 30-minute project status meeting without checking our email. What’s the key difference? Drama.Drama is the driving engine of every movie. Over the years, screenwriters have mastered the art of conflict to draw you in and keep you entertained.

Allowing For Drama

The hook is the first key to injecting drama into a meeting. As the leader of the meeting, it behooves you to ensure that you set up the meeting within the first 10 minutes such that your team understands and appreciates what is at stake.You may need to illustrate the consequences of a bad decision, highlight a competitive threat, appeal to the meeting participants’ commitment to a larger mission, or remind them of the impact their decision has on their clients, employees, or society at large.

Injecting Drama: The Hook

An intelligent group of diverse people will seldom agree on issues that matter. It’s natural and productive for disagreement to unfold. Working to resolve those differences and compromise on a unique solution is interesting, productive, and fun.When you avoid these disagreements and stifle debate, you bury resentment and frustration that will fester and manifest itself in other forms of unproductive personal conflict, or politics. You have deprived your team of actively engaging in the meeting and working towards a better solution.As a leader, you must have the courage to mine for conflict.

Mine for Conflict

Sometimes the group in attendance will be reluctant to challenge each other in active debate. One tactic you can use to mine for conflict in this situation is to give real time permission. At the start of the meeting, a leader may announce that the topic is expected to drive conflict, and that meeting members are encouraged to debate and challenge one another.Acknowledging the discomfort associated with conflict, while still challenging the group with your expectation up front, is a great way to diffuse tension and set the meeting up for a healthy and engaging debate.

Give Real-Time Permission

A meeting without contextual structure leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. One generic meeting format is a surefire recipe for ineffective meetings.Without context, some team members will believe that the meeting should have been shorter and focused on tactical day-to-day issues, while others will be upset that the meeting didn’t allow enough time to have a thorough strategic discussion. You cannot satisfy both at the same time. We must be disciplined to structure our meetings with the purpose to cater towards a specific business need.

Providing Context with Structure

The daily check-in is a 5-minute standing meeting where the team gets together in the morning to clarify the actions they intend to take that day. It provides a forum for ensuring nothing falls through the cracks and the team is informed and aligned with what everyone else is doing. You will be amazed by how just 5 minutes in the morning will drastically reduce the number of superfluous emails between team members sent throughout the day.The rules for the Daily Check-In are simple. 5 minutes. Standing. Everyday.

The Daily Five Minute Check-In

The Weekly Tactical is analogous to a weekly staff meeting, but the focus is more disciplined. The Weekly Tactical is focused exclusively on tactical issues of immediate concern.The rules for the Weekly Tactical are as follows: Everyone always attends. It is facilitated with a sense of discipline and structural consistency.

The Weekly Tactical

Lightning Round: A quick, around-the-table reporting session in which everyone communicates their two or three priorities of the week. Each person is given 60 seconds.Progress Review: Next, the group should routinely review the reports on critical business information or metrics. This should take no longer than five minutes.Real-Time Agenda: The agenda for a Weekly Tactical should NOT be set before the meeting, but only after the lightning round and progress review have taken place.

The Three Components Of The Weekly Tactical Meeting

It’s where the executive team grapples with complex and critical issues that will fundamentally influence the direction of the business.The length of the Monthly Strategic will vary depending on the topics addressed. But the rule of thumb says that it will require at least two hours, and should not cover more than two topics.This type of meeting requires a prepared agenda and upfront research or preparation by the team members. It is imperative that the leader mines for conflict in these meetings and that the team engages in constructive debate as they work to arrive at the best solution.

The Monthly Strategic

An effective Quarterly Offsite Review is an opportunity for executives to step away from the immediate issues that normally command their attention, and free them to review the business from a more holistic, long-term perspective.In these offsite meetings, the team may review their strategic direction in light of their competition or industry trends. They may evaluate the strength of their own team or the strength of their organization with a personnel review.

The Quarterly Offsite Review

Meetings are the nexus of all business decisions and activities. We need to remember that meetings are human. They require a personal touch. Rigid rules and agendas will never solve our meeting dilemma. Leaning out the process by eliminating the number of meetings we have won’t help either. Reducing the amount of face to face communication only guarantees more confusion and lack of clarity.It’s with the help of drama and context that leaders stand to reclaim a productive meeting culture.

The Bottom Line

Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life. In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch. “How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered. In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary. Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings. Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen. As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion.

Death by Meeting

Managers struggle with strategic planning — to the extent that some experts claim that there’s no such thing. Actually, strategic planning is a very useful part of the toolkit, provided you can avoid the stumbling blocks. <ul><li>The key is to recognize that a strategic plan is not a to-do list but rather a set of ideas that you will certainly change. </li><li>Given that, it’s important to build change into the process. </li><li>Finally, don’t tie your strategic plan too closely to your budget.</li></ul>

Strategic Planning: Key Takeaways

Strategic planning has been branded a “big lie.” One reason is that what really unfolds for an organization is not the same as what was articulated in the strategic plan to begin with. The result “emerges.” In other words, the plan needs updating as time progresses.Another criticism is that what takes place in “strategic” planning isn’t “strategy” at all. Business-as-usual takes over and the creative thinking behind bold business moves becomes sidelined. For these and other reasons strategic planning has long been scheduled for a big “fall.” That prediction was made nearly 30 years ago.

A Big Lie All Along

You need to not only accept volatility but also recognize your inability to come up with the perfect plan. Change your strategy mindset.Even if we thought we’d found the perfect plan, it wouldn’t be the answer for very long. The business’s circumstances are changing so fast.

Stumbling Block 1: Unrealistic Expectations

Don’t get stymied by overemphasizing “planning” in your company’s strategy development.Strategic planning is a way of making sense of an uncertain future. That’s not to say the future will turn out exactly as planned. Nor does it mean no plan at all since even an often-changing plan produces preparedness.

Stumbling Block 2: Wrong Model

Budgeting takes place within the context set by the strategic plan. The point at which the budget is set is the same point at which executive and shareholder expectations are put in place. Now circumstances change. And in a flexible planning environment, so does the strategic plan. Loosen the coupling between budget and plan.

Stumbling Block 3: Budget Override

Strategic planning won’t disappear anytime soon. It’s a way of shaping how to negotiate a changing future. Everyone needs that.A strategic plan is also not a set-and-execute document. Developing it involves a responsive process of continual anticipation. It’s a way to contemplate changing circumstances. Without a plan, you lack preparedness.So, your strategic plan will be “wrong.” That’s ok. Go ahead and make one anyway.

A Plan Is Important Even If We Deviate From It

Managers struggle with strategic planning — to the extent that some experts claim that there’s no such thing. Actually, strategic planning is a very useful part of the toolkit, provided you can avoid the stumbling blocks. The key is to recognize that a strategic plan is not a to-do list but rather a set of ideas that you will certainly change. Given that, it’s important to build change into the process. Finally, don’t tie your strategic plan too closely to your budget.

3 Stumbling Blocks Of Strategic Planning

Change is hard, but it doesn't have to be if we better manage our expectations and our attitude toward change overall. After all, change is an inevitable constant, and part of developing a mindset for accepting change comes down to how one prepares for and communicates those changes.
In the workplace, the formal term for addressing change is through a process called organizational change management, where methods and strategies are deployed to help drive employees to accept and embrace change.

Organizational Change

Before launching a change management effort, you should have an established vision and an implementation plan. If not, it will be difficult to ask people to change when they don't even understand what the plan or change is. A plan with a clear vision that explains where you are, where you are going, and most importantly, what it means for participants impacted by the change is critical to get right.In providing the plan and vision, use data and tell a story to help crystallize the vision.

Provide the Vision

The success of an organizational change process is often predicated on who you start your message with. As leaders, you want to get buy-in as well as input from your key stakeholders on the plan and vision. By starting with the right audiences, you can attain strategic alignment from the onset and cascade it up and down the organization. Early buy-in can help reduce unforced errors and other unintended consequences later on, such as decreased employee morale or a loss of leadership credibility.

Who to Tell First

One of the most important aspects of organizational change management is managing expectations. This is bedrock: Too often plans are rolled out and timetables are committed to but leaders don't give those impacted a clear understanding of what will happen next.Depending on the complexity of the organizational change and the magnitude of what the change might feel like for those impacted, managing expectations is paramount. Managing expectations comes down to letting people know what is or isn't going to happen.

Manage Expectations

A pitfall some leaders make is sugarcoating the message and engaging in equivocating double talk. People deserve respect, and being straight up with people is a form of professional consideration and decency.Another important aspect of managing organizational change is recognizing that different audiences may need different information. The right level of information is key. Too much information may overwhelm, while too little may cause unneeded tension. Figure out your audiences and who needs to know what and when.

Being Clear

When delivering messages, it is important to have the right messenger -- a person who is trusted, an authority, and who can help lead the change as an effective messenger. There can be times when the wrong messenger was selected and they couldn't effectively meet the moment, which undermined the organizational change efforts. When the messenger isn't acceptable, the whole message can be discounted simply because there is an aversion to the presenter.

The Right Messenger

And at times, there can be multiple messengers for multiple audiences. As a leader, think about all the people on the team who have the necessary credibility and leverage their leadership to cascade the message. Often, people will welcome the opportunity to hear from other leaders.

Tailoring Of The Message

Some messages bear repeating, so complex organizational changes usually require multiple channels through which to communicate and then reiterate the message. You can't expect all audiences to hear or see the message the first, second, or even third time.

Rinse, Repeat, and Reinforce

Leaders need to consider all the channels they could use to convey the message -- video, email, Slack, town halls, FAQs, office hours, and newsletters -- to effectively meet staff where they typically like to receive information. <ul><li>The primary goal of a successful organizational change effort is making sure the plurality of those impacted understand what the message is and how it impacts them. </li><li>Secondly, it's getting them to take action if any is required.</li></ul>

Change is an opportunity and the outlook is the mindset.

Thinking in Systems

The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work

Death by Meeting

3 Stumbling Blocks Of Strategic Planning

5 Tips in Communicating Organizational Change

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