I often reflect on my school years. I know the education world has changed since the seventies and eighties. However, I’m still fascinated by how little I’ve been taught to turn into a better thinker.
It turned out to be the opposite.
Teachers “brainwashed” me with what others had discovered before me. They fed me conventional wisdom, and problem-solving was first about turning significant issues into chewable chunks.
This traditional education led me to approach the world through steps, increments, and sequences.
I don’t deny that it can be helpful if you’re looking for a cake recipe or a foolproof method to run your first 5k. But you can easily miss the bigger picture and get caught in a life of aimless routine.
Fast forward to the present day, and I realize that all the great tech around me isn’t helping either. All these tools at my fingertips are dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator. I can monitor almost everything, but I’m not thinking anymore. I’m multi-tasking, and my brain is in auto-pilot mode.
That’s the most dangerous thing that can happen in the business world. Most problems there are not ones that can be solved by dividing things into smaller chunks.
They’re complex and are part of a larger context with interdependencies. The decisions you make will impact not only the task at hand but also the bigger picture. It will impact your business tomorrow and years from now.
The more you try to split things, the more context you lose. You cannot see the interactions and dependencies anymore. You end up faltering, not progressing.
So, how can you successfully solve problems that no school ever taught you the secrets of?
Simply by turning on your systems thinking.
It’s not a new phenomenon. Systems thinkers are everywhere. They can be mechanics who understand the roles and interactions of every part to make a car run. Or doctors who spend their lives discovering all the intricacies of the human body.
Systems thinkers know how to connect wholes rather than separate parts. They know all the pieces of an organization are related and will consider different scenarios and their consequences. They’ll focus on root causes and dig deeper.
The most successful business leaders I have worked with were great systems thinkers. They understood that value creation depends on all the resources companies have access to.
These can be a purpose, tangible and intangible assets, profit, people, or partners. Even the whole planet is here as a resource for the systems thinker.
It’s all interrelated. That’s how Amazon, Apple, and Google built their empires. They focused on building ecosystems where each part was related.
So, the next time you have to solve a typical business problem, think of it as if it were a living organism. Know the parts well, but pay even more attention to how they play with each other and what you can gain out of these interactions.
By doing so, you’ll better connect the immediate task at hand to the bigger picture.
Your customers, partners, and teams will thank you for that.