Richard Karash speaks to ACCJ members on Systems Thinking at Roppongi Hills on October 22.
About Richard Karash
Richard Karash’s work covers a broad range of Organizational Learning disciplines, with special emphasis on Systems Thinking and System Dynamics. He is a founding partner in Systems Perspectives LLC and a principal in Karash Associates. Mr. Karash was a senior staff member at Innovation Associates, Inc. (later Arthur D. Little) from 1991 through 1995, and a contributor to “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization,” and “The Systems Thinker.” He was a founding trustee of the Society for Organizational Learning, and a former Chairman of the Sustainability Institute. He teaches leadership programs for a range of corporate and government clients, and also teaches coaches and consultants.
Imagine you belong to a small golf club. You have lost members in the recession, and as a result, revenues are down. The board gets together to think up ways to increase revenues, and decides that affordability may be an issue. They come up with an idea to attract new members—a new, lower-priced membership for people who only play on weekdays.
What do you think happens? The new option does bring in some new members, but too many of the current members—the cheaper, more frugal portion of the membership—trade down from full membership to weekdays only. The net result is an even steeper fall in revenues. Guess what additional actions they are considering a year later? Yet another class of membership!
Richard Karash, contributor to Peter Senge’s “Fifth Discipline Fieldbook” and founding trustee of the Society of Organizational Learning, presented a talk at the ACCJ on building capacity for Systems Thinking on Friday, October 22.
The golf club story is a real example taken from Karash’s own experience and elegantly illustrates the risk of unintended consequences that arise when solutions are pursued without thinking about the wider systemic ramifications. This idea of unintended consequences is a central tenet in Systems Thinking, which is an approach to dealing with complexity.
The world is getting more complicated. The performance bar is higher, the competition is tougher, and technological change is more rapid. Are we keeping up in terms of our ability to see, understand, and deal with the related challenges and complexity? For simple environments simple understanding is sufficient. More complex environments require systems understanding.
Often, organizations find themselves in systemic binds that, when unseen, impede performance. Leading from a “systems perspective” is about building the capacity for awareness, agility, understanding, and high-leverage actions that may not initially be noticeable from a more limited perspective.
What is a system? What is a “Systems Perspective?” How we can increase our ability to identify unseen systems? To start with, what is a system? There are technical definitions, but the important point is that systems do something. Systems produce results. Systems push us around, drive behaviors, and make us look smart…or not so smart.
Systems Thinking has been evolving throughout the 20th century. Peter Senge, in his landmark book “The Fifth Discipline,” put Systems Thinking on the map as an important discipline. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in tools, models, and methods. Less visible, but probably more important, has been a subtle shift in perspective. We are now reaching a broad synthesis that the world and the universe are both fully systemic in nature—ultimately we are all parts of a whole.
Research has demonstrated that organizational performance isn’t just about how hard a team works or how smart they are, especially in a business environment that is increasingly complex and unpredictable. Sustainable growth requires a nuanced understanding of the systems that pervade our business and organizational environment.
Identifying systems is a cognitive skill. Like all cognitive skills, right from the most basic recognition of objects, this skill is learned through practice and interaction with others. Like all cognitive skills, transference from one domain to another takes some practice. For example, research shows that engineers of great skill with physical systems often fail to see similar systems that occur in their families and work groups.
