EN 37: Career advancement and system thinking

This post by Elizabeth Ayer got me.

The most significant mind shift for me has been my growing appreciation of systems and system thinking. I try to “make sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts”.

By no means I would consider myself an expert system thinker, I’m only a system’s “aficionado” or “appreciator”, a person who believes that there’s value in observing things holistically, and in relation to other things.

It all started with Extreme Programming and Agile, then DevOps, which took me to lean and system thinking.

However, this way of “seeing” and the knowledge that comes with it hasn’t really changed anything for me professionally, in terms of career advancement or opportunities.

System thinking has changed the way I approach and reason about the world. That includes work, and hopefully that has had a positive impact on the people working with me. Nonetheless, thinking in this way can make me a bit more open to recognising patterns or behaviours that are beating good people, and also can increase the dissatisfaction.

Talking about patterns, I’ve also noticed—which might not be related to system thinking—that I can easily identify common issues, like a spider-sense kind of thing, after spotting them in previous experiences. In fact, a hobby of mine is to observe the company, the team, the way they work, the behaviours, etc. and try to understand what the potential constraints or obstacles to flow are, be aware of the incentives, feedback loops, etc. This is a continuous observation, it never ends, and there’s never a single root cause to the issues we face. It’s all interconnected.

With this hobby and some experience, I’ve been able to get an okay picture, at least at a certain lens and recognising that that picture is not the complete world around me. John Cutler once wrote that —and I’m paraphrasing— “companies are similar in their problems, but different in the way they’re successful”. After a while, you tend to recognise those common issues, high work in progress being almost ubiquitous. The thing is that even if you recognise the issue, it does not mean you can apply the exact solution every time.

It’s not magic, this is a disclaimer with the goal of establishing that I don’t think what I’m doing is anything special or incredible. I do think that I don’t see many people curious about improving and about the systems we live in. We just have to look at politicians or the typical company.

I’m sceptical about the usefulness of system thinking in career advancement because of the belief in shared fictions, as Elizabeth Ayer puts it, which you’re not going to be so sold on.

Pursuing alternatives could potentially put you in an antagonistic position, even if it’s just a feeling you have, and not pursuing them can make you feel like you’re faking it.

I’m not saying you can’t encourage change productively, you definitely can, but if the conditions aren’t right, I’m starting to notice that I give up faster than before. There’s less patience in the tank. If possible, I’d like to switch my door.

Finally, if you’re interested in this type of thing, these are good starting points:

• Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows.

• Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge, John Willis.

• Drift Into Failure, Sidney Dekker.

Interesting links

• Why we’re still in love with the idea that ‘Great Men’ shape history.

• Ship / Show / Ask. Rouan Wilsenach has an interesting take on branches and Pull Requests. It can work well if you can’t avoid doing PRs.

• Cost of Delay – An Introduction (3-min video). Cost of Delay is a phenomenal way to communicate the impact of time on value, which helps us to prioritise work better. If you find it a bit daunting because, you can also use Qualitative Cost of Delay. I find it useful as people have trouble separating urgency and value, mixing them when saying something is “important”, but not everything valuable has high urgency and not everything urgent has high value.

• The Magic Prioritization Trick. In this post, John Cutler writes about a workshop around Qualitative Cost of Delay, which can blow people’s mind when they see the difference between urgency and value and how that affects prioritization.