How to think in systems (3 tools)

Have you ever felt this at work, in life, where you're working on a problem together with someone and some people somehow are able to see within the same problem statement an element of the problem that you never even crossed my mind? We're looking at the same problem but depending on the tools we use to think through it, the problem looks easy for some people and looks difficult to others. And consistently, great thinkers use these three system thinking tools. So I thought, we're a group of people who always need to work on big, hairy, complex problems. Let's look at what those tools are and also what the tools they don't use because they use system thinking tools. Number one, with system thinkers' breakdown complexity, they don't focus on things. They focus on things and the connections between them. Let's use a simple example. Say, what is a university? For most people, the natural thing to say, okay, it's a place of higher education where people learn, they do research, and there's different majors, areas of study like engineering, English, politics, and there are profs, students, administrators, right? People start to list things out. We tend to think that bigger things are made up of smaller things and our dictionaries actually define things this way as well. But this is why we don't have the right tools to break down complexity. But with system thinking, it's about breaking the world down into things and then see the connections between them. Both are important. All of a sudden, if you look at the world through that lens, you realize, okay, things are getting a little clearer, right? With the university, it's a network of knowledge flow between professors, researchers, students, general society. They do that through lectures, publications, through projects. And once we understand that, we know how the majors fit into it. We know how the different people fit into it. We increase the density of our ideas with system thinking because we can point out the things, but also how they fit together. And increasing the density of our ideas is one of the fundamental things we must do when we communicate clearly. I talk about it more in this video. You can check it out later. Now, the second thing system thinkers don't do is they don't just focus on information inflow. They focus on outflow as well. A really great example are companies and how they think about their talent pool, their people, right? For 80% of companies, all they think about is how can I hire great talent, right? They're thinking about the inflow of people. How can I get the best people into my company? But if you're a system thinker, you'll realize, okay, it's not just about finding great people, but how do you keep them? How can you make sure they don't leave? How can you make sure that you don't fire them? Or let's use a personal example, self-improvement, right? We're all here because we want to get better. We want to reach our potential. But so many of us are thinking about what can I learn more? Which podcast can I listen to next? Which book should I read next? And we're thinking about how can I gain more? How can I hoard more? But what if we flipped it and said, okay, I already have a lot. Where does that knowledge go? How should I apply it? How should I process it? How should I turn it into YouTube videos? This is one of the key reasons why we, as a society, think so short term. We're over indexing on what needs to come in, but we're not thinking about once it's in, what do we do with it? Those who want to accumulate more money, that's great. But once you add all those zeros to your bank account, and then what? Those of us who are learning constantly, we learned all those good stuff. And then what? Those of us who want to build our network, we go and meet new people. And then what? We're not nurturing those relationships. We're not nurturing the relationships we already have. I mentioned these because these were my mistakes too. That's why now I don't accept most sponsorships. That's why now I am creating YouTube videos, I'm writing, I'm creating courses. And this is why now I keep my circle relatively small. I realize I'm not doing much with the things that I accumulate. And I have to think about not just the inflow, but also the outflow. The key question is, and then what? Because we all know that empty feeling we get after reaching a goal. It leaves us feeling empty because we cannot answer this question. And then what? So the third thing that system thinkers use as a tool is they don't analyze just the cost of action. They analyze the cost of inaction. As you can see with the last example, you might've noticed, resources or problems can accumulate invisibly. Like how knowledge inside us accumulates, but it has nowhere to go. Or in an organization, knowledge slowly dissipates because they're not being documented. Or at work, while we are building all our visible outputs, our progress, all of those promotions in the background, we are accumulating both the cognitive and emotional costs. Those lost sleep, skipped meals, those family moments that we weren't there for, or the personal projects that we're neglecting and building all that guilt around. So these small but important problems start to build up. And all of a sudden we have a burnout episode, some sort of health scare, but it wasn't actually sudden. It really accumulated over time invisibly a lot of the times. And what systems thinkers know is that that invisible accumulation eventually becomes visible when it crosses a critical threshold. So system thinkers look at trends over time instead of just one snapshot at a time. Because by looking at the trend, you can see where you're going. If you're going towards a threshold that means reaching your goal, or you're going towards a threshold where it means that you're reaching your limit and how quickly you're doing that. Knowing that will make the cost of both action and inaction clear. There are of course a lot more mental models and tools that come from system thinking. You can check them out here and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!