By Janice Molloy
Our Spidey sense here at Pegasus tingles whenever anyone in the mainstream media hints at systems principles in action, but especially when it's someone like Nobel prize-winnin
g economist Paul Krugman. On Sunday, July 13, Krugman's weekly op-ed column in the New York Times appeared with the title, "Boiling the Frog."
The parable of the boiling frog is often used to illustrate the "Drifting Goals" systems archetype (see the recent blog post, "Keeping Performance Up to Speed"). According to the (likely apocryphal) story, if you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to jump out. On the other hand, if you put it in cold water and then gradually raise the temperature, the frog will happily swim around until it--there's no delicate way to put this--cooks. The frog's survival instincts are geared toward detecting dramatic changes, not incremental ones.
In his column, Krugman uses the boiling frog as a metaphor for "the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time"--specifically with regards to the current complacency in the U.S. around the economy and the environment. With no dramatic meltdown imminent, policy makers and citizens seem to have lost the will for decisive action on either of these fronts, despite unemployment and sea levels that continue to rise. As Krugman goes on to say, "These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect--a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet--yet in which it's very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold."
In Systems Archetype Basics, Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson list a number of ways to manage the "Drifting Goals" structure, including:
- Identify what's drifting.
- Check for competing goals.
- Identify what's driving the setting of goals.
- Explore procedures for correcting gaps.
- Reestablish the organization's vision.
In the case of the economy and the environment, this last item seems to hold the highest leverage. It involves recommitting to the quality of life we want for our citizens and the legacy we intend to leave for our children and grandchildren. Once we are clear about our collective goals, the challenge becomes deciding what actions we need to take now--rather than waiting until it is too late for us to jump out of the pot.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.
frog photo by Ren West
By Janice Molloy
A while back, I ran a utility program on my relatively new computer. While I had decked it out with all of the appropriate 
antivirus features, I hadn't yet run a maintenance check. After all, I'd only had the computer for a few months, well, o.k., it had been seven, but what could possibly happen in that short amount of time?
Apparently, plenty. The software found dozens of errors. No problem--the maintenance program fixed them, defragmented the hard disk, and I was back in business.
What I didn't anticipate from this housekeeping task was the radical improvement in the computer's performance. It blazed! Programs launched in the wink of an eye; graphic-heavy web sites loaded in an instant. As I witnessed these feats, I was reminded how speedy the processor had been when I first got the computer.
But why hadn't I noticed how sluggish it had gotten? Little by little, I had shifted my expectations. The decline had been gradual, and performance was still within acceptable limits, so I adapted to the slower access and load times.
Lowering Performance Goals
In systems thinking terms, I had experienced the "Drifting Goals" systems archetype. This pattern of behavior involves lowering our goals rather than taking corrective actions. Sometimes we do so because these actions are undesirable, as in the case of cutting expenses in order to reach profit goals. Sometimes we're focused on other factors that seem more important; for example, we may be so caught up with efforts to boost sales that we fail to notice that quality has slipped. And sometimes, because our senses aren't attuned to gradual changes over time, we just don't notice that performance has dropped.
Adjusting our expectations isn't always bad, but if we're going to change our goals, we should do so consciously. The key is to know our objectives and to track performance vis-à-vis these benchmarks. Most manufacturing companies have mechanisms in place for monitoring adherence to quality standards. Organizations also tend to stay on top of financial and sales goals through routine reporting. When it's not practical to measure performance on a continual basis, then a regular check-up may be in order.
Steady On
Here are ideas for making sure that performance stays steady over time in your organization:
- Identify variables that are important to organizational performance, especially those that aren't usually on the radar scope, such as employee morale.
- Establish performance standards for these variables. Keep the standards visible.
- Track performance versus the standards.
- If it's not possible or practical to track performance analytically, collect input from an objective source--a learning partner, an outside coach, a semi-annual employee survey.
- Experiment to find the right interval between "check-ups"--too often and you might find them more trouble than they are worth, too infrequent and problems might spin out of control before you catch them.
- If you are tempted to shift a goal, be deliberate! Look into the causes and consequences of doing so before taking action.
- Learn from experience. If you've noticed unacceptable changes in a variable, design a maintenance program to keep it on track in the future.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.