Tuesday, March 12, 2019

See Things Underneath and Around Corners

The deep problem that reveals is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by the mind switches and how we can leverage Systems Thinking to understand and solve crucial problems. 

Due to the faster pace of changes, overwhelming growth of information, and “VUCA” digital new normal, today’s business world is sophisticated from many perspectives. Systems Thinking is the ability to navigate levels of abstraction or logic as an essential thinking skill, helps people see the interconnected relationship between the parts and the whole, see things underneath and around the corner, be sensitive to the emergent factors, and take the balanced view of digital flow.

See around corners: The more complex the situation is, the more important to leverage systems thinking, critical thinking as well as other multidimensional thought processes to see underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes of the problem and see around corners without ignoring some pieces of important information. In practice, so many business "managers" focus on the tangibles, but lack an in-depth understanding of invisible or intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. The business system is complex and the organization is contextual today, without the contextual understanding of people, process, and technology, the blind spots, understanding gaps, and change pitfalls are inevitable. To breakthrough thinking ceilings, you need to build the solid Systems Thinking block, be able to perceive the invisible behind the visible, recognize the connections and interdependence, gain sufficient knowledge and unique insight to observe deeper and see around the corner, have an in-depth understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario, see around the corner, and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge to get to the heart of the matter.

Understand different perspectives without pushing toward the one that you think is the truth: The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for understanding. People bring different perspectives and the boundaries might have changed based on the open conversations and taking the time to thoughtfully think about the specific issue and common challenges from different angles. The truth is the whole coin. Perspective is looking at either heads or tails. A coin is an interesting metaphor as while your focus is on heads, you cannot see tails; and while looking at tails, you cannot see heads, besides two sides, there are interrelationships between these two sides, as the third side of the coin. The secret lies in "imagining" a perspective of the whole coin as you aspire towards truth. From the problem-solving perspective, you don’t need to agree completely with the other side of viewpoint, but you can always gain empathy, insight, and fresh perspective to see things from the other angle and be creative to figure out alternative solutions. For many business leaders, there is no surprise that they will see the mixed picture of “old and new,” from the mindset, business model, process or practice perspectives, making decisions based on opening up with diverse viewpoint, careful and comprehensive analysis and synthesis, and getting input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive difference of people on the particular matter in order to improve decision effectiveness.


See underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes: Too often people may take the easy path, think, and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time to understand what is going on underneath. Superficiality means to focus on just symptoms, not root causes; only catch the conventional understanding of content, not the contextual insight beneath the surface. To breakthrough thinking ceilings, you need to think profoundly by leveraging systems thinking, have sufficient knowledge and unique insight to observe deeper, and see things underneath. Systems Thinking is nothing more than a good combination of analytic and synthetic thinking, go beyond the surface to dig through the root cause of problems arising. Build confidence that you have applied sufficient rigor in your analysis, apply the “WHY” staircase technique many times over, using a structured methodology that allows you to capture and analyze the results for achieving two goals: One is getting to the truth, the other is avoiding falsehood.

The deep problem that reveals is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by the mind switches and how we can leverage Systems Thinking to understand and solve crucial problems facing businesses and our society today effectively.

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