Recently, my husband and I celebrated our 50th birthdays with a hot air balloon ride. Although the intent was for pure fun, systems thinking crept into my experience. How? To be honest, I saw 
systems everywhere I looked: in the patterns on the ground, the reflections in the bodies of water, and the interconnectedness of the natural environment. Here are some of the “Aha!” moments from our flight.
Seeing Whole Systems: As we lifted off and floated over very familiar terrain, we were struck by how little we actually see while driving in a car. There were wetlands, streams, roads, and buildings we never knew existed. The experience reminded me of the famous Einstein quote, “The problems we have created in the world today will not be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Why? Because we cannot see the whole system unless we rise to a new level of understanding.
Discerning Patterns: At the altitude of a balloon ride, the patterns of the land stand out in utter clarity. The evening was perfect for flight—warm with no wind. Shortly after takeoff, our pilot dipped us into Lake Fairlee, taking on several inches of water in the basket. As we lifted off again, he asked us to stand at one end to help the water drain. A column of water droplets drained from the corner in a pattern that defies description. Our pilot used those drops throughout the flight to identify imperceptible patterns in the air current that gently pushed us along.
Changing Perspectives to Identify New Leverage Points: One of the most challenging aspects of hot air balloon flight is locating a safe and appropriate place to land that is convenient for the chase crew. As we crossed the Connecticut River into New Hampshire, our pilot had an idea of where we might land, but the air current moved us in a different direction. However, as we moved farther away from the river, the cooler air flowing downhill pushed us back, and we ultimately landed where he had originally expected. He just kept responding to the feedback from the system.
Understanding Delays in the System: Hot air balloon flight is completely based on physics: the movement of air currents, the pull of gravity, and the fact that hot air rises. The propane burner, of course, provides the heat to create the hot air for lift. However, the lift is not immediate. As the pilot maneuvered to land in what appeared to be a fairly tight spot surrounded by trees, he would apply heat to just barely carry us up and over those trees. I kept thinking we would crash into the treetops because I didn’t understand the delay in the lift. I was impressed with our pilot’s patience and deft choreography.
My recommendation? Take a hot air balloon ride some day. It is a concrete and visceral example of systems thinking in action, and it will create a powerful metaphor for what is required to truly be a systems thinker.
Marty Jacobs, president of Systems In Sync, has been teaching and consulting for 20 years, applying a systems thinking approach to organizations. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Marty received her M.S. in Organization and Management from Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, NH. She can be reached at www.systemsinsync.com or marty@systemsinsync.com.
© Marty Jacobs 2010
Hot air balloon photo
by Michael Ballé
What is the relationship between systems thinking and lean? That's a fascinating question, one not so easily answered, because we're talking about two very different approaches, one a philosophy as well as a set of tools, the other, a practice. In its broadest sense, systems thinking is a framework that takes into 
account the interconnected nature of systems. It is also a thinking tool, which helps us look at the impact of feedback loops on how a system behaves; analyze specific situations to explain otherwise puzzling behaviors; and design interventions with an eye for potential unintended consequences.
Lean, on the other hand, is strictly a practice, not a philosophy. It is based on hands-on know how about how to teach people to improve their own processes in terms of both customer satisfaction and cost management by eliminating waste. Taiichi Ohno, a key figure in developing the lean approach, would often say things like: "Don't look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don't think with your head, think with your hands." As a practice-oriented movement, lean is by and large wary of abstract thinking and generalizations.
Nonetheless, although systems thinking and lean operate at these two different levels, I have learned from personal experience that they are complementary and are based on similar insights. An understanding of system thinking dramatically improves the learning curve of lean techniques. Having worked with systems thinking concepts and system dynamics simulations for years before studying lean practices in detail, I immediately saw the purpose (if not the application) of lean, which wasn't the case for my colleagues without a systems thinking background.
Conversely, at the time, I was part of a group tasked with figuring out ways to practically apply systems thinking concepts in day-to-day operations. Although we experimented, we generally floundered. What we did find was that the lean techniques offered a hands-on way to apply systems thinking concepts. Because lean practices have been developed over several decades, an entire field of experience exists in terms of how to make them work.
The bottom line: Without an understanding of systems thinking, it's hard to get lean right, and without the practice of lean techniques, it's difficult to make systems thinking a day-to-day reality to concretely improve system performance.
To Understand and to Change
The rapid progress of science since the Industrial Revolution has been driven by the close interplay of theoretical and practical advances. I believe that the mutual interdependence of systems thinking and lean offers a true opportunity here. By recognizing the synergies between these two fields, we can drastically increase our capacity to improve systems.
The bad news is that integrating these two approaches means more work. If I'm correct, system thinkers must acquire the discipline of lean practice. This has been my own particular path: fun, interesting, but never easy. And lean practitioners must make the effort to understand systems thinking, which is a significant intellectual investment.
Still, I believe this challenge is worthwhile. In today's hypercompetitive markets, companies need the performance improvement promised by lean. Furthermore, the strong systems thinking undercurrent of lean makes it focus on reducing waste of all kinds, including externalities such as pollution and garbage. Since its humble beginnings to its recent 2020 global vision, Toyota has continuously aimed to offer value to society overall. Considering the problems we collectively face in this new century, a proven method of industrial improvement also intent on reducing waste in all its forms should not be dismissed lightly.
One of the enduring puzzles of the lean movement is why it hasn't spread more quickly through industry: Many try, few succeed. Systems thinking, I believe, could contribute significantly to solving this conundrum by providing an overall framework to lean practice. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it. Systems thinking offers the means to understand; lean, the practice to change. By pursuing both jointly, we can learn faster how to change the world in the right way to face our global challenges.
Adapted from "What Is the Relationship Between Systems Thinking and Lean?" published in The Systems Thinker, November 2009, V20N9.
Michael Ballé is associate researcher at Telecom ParisTech and managing partner of ESG Consultants. He has written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing with Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored two business novels, The Gold Mine, which has received the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research, and The Lean Manager. Michael is co-founder of the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France.
Lock photo by Nancy Daugherty
By Deborah Meehan
As the debates raged over healthcare reform in an attempt to break the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, I wondered what had happened to "yes we can." The election of Barack Obama was an energizing time that mobilized high levels of participation across the political spectrum. Change was a big theme. Presidential candidate Obama's rallying cry reminded many of us that we were a part of making change happen.
During the campaign, tens of thousands joined meet-ups, used online tools for campaign organizing, and contributed small donations. But what happened to this active engagement among Obama supporters once he was elected? While there is much to learn from the 2008 campaign about how to create the conditions for self-organization and how to leverage social networks, I would like to focus on how our mental models about leadership are limiting our ability to achieve breakthrough change.
Our current thinking about leadership, whether in communities or boardrooms, is heavily influenced by the idea of the hero. We generally think of leadership as the skills, qualities, and behavior of an individual who exerts influence over others to take action or achieve a goal using his or her position, authority, or charisma. Our attachment to the heroic model is one plausible factor for why high levels of civic engagement did not continue among Obama supporters after the election. People who participated in the campaign retreated and expected the president to deliver on change by virtue of his office/authority, without their continued involvement.
In this way, the culture of heroic individuals is undercutting our ability to mobilize ourselves for large-scale change. We cannot approach systems-level transformation one leader at a time. We can reach more people and tackle bigger problems by investing our energy and resources in strengthening leadership processes that support organizations, communities, and networks to take collective action.
My colleagues and I have joined forces with key innovators in the leadership field to promote leadership as a process through which individuals and groups identify and act on behalf of a larger purpose, such as greater equality and the well-being of people and the planet. We believe leadership as a process is grounded in relationships that are fluid, dynamic, and non-unilateral.
Although the dominant model of leadership in the U.S is deeply rooted in individualism, numerous other cultures understand it as collective and relational. Intuitively, many of us have experienced the power of shared leadership through teams, sports, and music groups, but we have not brought this experience to how we think about leadership.
Imagine a different way for how we could become involved in the topics that we care most about, such as healthcare, the environment, or the economy. To support our engagement in 
leadership that can tackle systems-level change, we need to focus on how individuals and groups are connecting, organizing, thinking systemically, bridging, and learning as a dynamic leadership process.
Those of us looking to sustain our involvement in the issues of the day need to build relationships and shared commitment with others around our common concerns. We need to develop transparent communication pathways and employ organizing (and self-organizing) principles and structures to set direction, plan, allocate resources, make decisions, and mobilize action within networks, organizations, and movements. We need to inform our change strategies with a systems perspective that helps us identify patterns and feedback loops, intervene using leverage points, and continually learn and adapt our strategies. This is the type of leadership process that will help us to implement "yes we can."
Deborah Meehan is founder and executive director of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), a nonprofit organization focused on transforming the way leadership is conceived, conducted, and evaluated. The LLC recently launched a collaborative research initiative that promotes leadership as a collective process.
By Janice Molloy
"A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other." --Anonymous
Have you resolved to make any changes in 2010? According to Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, most of us won't achieve the goals we set on January 1. He and his team found that only 12% of the 700 people they polled fulfilled their New Year's resolutions.
Maybe part of the challenge lies in the concept of "resolution." Flipping through Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, I was surprised to see that the first current definition of "resolve" is "a: break up, separate" and "b: to reduce by analysis (~the problem into simple elements)." Not until the fifth definition did I find "to reach a firm decision about (~to get more sleep)." Followers of the late Russ Ackoff know that phrases such as "reduce by analysis" are red flags, signaling a potentially non-systemic approach to problem solving.
In a recent post on his Idea Architects blog, Jeffrey Cufaude questioned our usual methods for trying to address enduring challenges. He wrote, "If you find yourself, either individually or organizationally, looking to re-solve the same issue repeatedly, you may need to direct your attention deeper. You likely need to think more systemically about why this same issue recurs. What beliefs, mindsets, policies, procedures, or practices help perpetuate the same behaviors or outcomes, the ones you want to change?"
With these perspectives in mind, I looked at one of my own longstanding resolutions: clearing out my email Inbox. By directing my attention deeper, can I "re-solve" the challenge once and for all? I turned to the systems thinking tool known as the "iceberg" for guidance.
Events, Patterns, Structure
Most change efforts focus on the event level. To address my overcrowded Inbox, I created a folder called "Old Inbox," moved 
my backlog of emails there, and mentally committed to emptying my current Inbox each day. Problem solved, right?
Not exactly. I have done the same thing several years in a row. Clearly, a pattern has emerged, in that my determination to behave differently hasn't stuck. As I recall from past years, for several days, I duly deleted emails as I dealt with them and filed those I needed for future reference. But, over time, the number of unsorted emails accumulated, until my clean Inbox was a distant memory.
Whenever we think we've addressed a problem only to have it recur again, we can be sure that it's a structural issue. As Jeffrey Cufaude suggested, I needed to look at the beliefs, mindsets, policies, procedures, and practices that have undercut my efforts time and again.
When I reflected on my email practices in greater detail--including the thoughts and feelings that influence my actions--I realized that I experience what productivity expert David Allen calls the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome." As shown in this loop, 
because of my fear of losing track of important items, I allow emails to accumulate in my Inbox. The growing number of emails reduces my ability to easily sort through them, which increases my stress and, in turn, my fear of misplacing something important.
Breaking the Vicious Cycle
The key, I decided, is to put systems in place to alleviate the fear and thus break the vicious cycle. The first thing I did was to experiment with a free, online to-do list (I use TeuxDeux; I'm sure there are others available). If an email includes a task I need to complete, I enter it on the list and move the email to a folder. Somehow, I feel more confident having the list online than in my planner.
Next, I followed a tip by David Allen. I created two folders that reside at the top of my email folder list: @Action and @Waiting For. Of course, I need to actively manage the content of these folders; otherwise, they'll become just as clogged as my Inbox used to be.
Will these actions be enough to change the underlying structure that influences my email habits? Time will tell, but so far, so good. Now about that exercise regimen . . .
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
By Janice Molloy
"I suspect that all it would take would be some well-placed user-friendly feedback to change the world." --Donella Meadows
Think about the last time you undertook a change initiative, whether in your work or personal life. How did you measure progress toward your goal? How did you know when to make adjustments?
The answer in most cases is through feedback. When a company launches a new product, they monitor sales data and customer comments; this information, in turn, influences their marketing efforts and guides them in tweaking the product to better meet people's needs. Without data about the results of our efforts, it's impossible to evaluate performance, fine-tune improvement efforts, and gauge the success of different actions.
In one of my favorite columns by pioneering systems educator Donella Meadows, she recounted learning to drive more efficiently based on the feedback provided by the instrument panel of her gas-electric hybrid car (in "To Make Better Decisions, We Need Better Information," The Systems Thinker, V11N7, September 2000). By watching the indicator lights, she discovered that jackrabbit starts and stops ate away at her miles-per-gallon average; driving at the speed limit had the opposite effect. Meadows concluded, "Three weeks of information I never had before have changed 40 years of ingrained driving habits. I didn't have to be coerced or rewarded; I didn't have to change my values. I just had to see how my actions did and did not conform to my values."
Feedback also plays a vital role in change efforts that take place on a larger scale. In his latest book, Ecological Intelligence (Broadway Books, 2009), Daniel Goleman dedicates a chapter to "The Virtuous Cycle." He recounts how trans fats came to permeate the Western diet throughout the 20th century--and became an unknown contributor to heart disease. But once researchers discovered the dangers of hydrogenated oils, within the span of a decade, trans fats virtually vanished.
What caused this food revolution? According to Goleman, "The federal government never banned hydrogenated oils. No one told food companies they had to stop using trans fat. The crucial shift was in the information available to consumers." Once purchasers understood the dangers of trans fat and were able to use nutritional information on food labels to avoid it, they shifted their buying habits. Food manufacturers quickly responded by removing trans fat from their products and broadly advertising that fact. Consumers spoke, and the food industry listened.
These lessons about feedback continue to resonate today, especially as we head into the negotiations at the Copenhagen climate summit. Our friends at Climate Interactive have created the "Climate Scoreboard," a widget to help monitor the long-term consequences of policy proposals. It shows, in a simple visual form, the expected temperatures in 2100 if curre
nt proposals in the global climate negotiations were fully implemented and indicates how close those proposals bring us to achieving climate goals. When negotiating positions change, a team in Copenhagen will immediately update the analysis.
As in the case of driving more efficiently, this kind of dashboard allows us to see the results of our actions--and then modify them to achieve our goals. And as in the case of eliminating trans fats, the Climate Scoreboard gives us a tool for pressuring others--our elected officials, world leaders, the media, and so on--to ensure that any agreements they make are adequate to the challenges we face. As Daniel Goleman says, "All it takes is a bit of radical transparency."
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
By Janice Molloy
What do a swaying bridge and tumultuous financial markets have in common? More than might be apparent at first glance. Both serve as vivid examples of systems that spiral out of control because of their underlying structures.
The Millennium Bridge opened in London on June 10, 2000. The first pedestrian bridge across the Thames in central London for more than a century, it attracted an estimated 80,000-100,000 visitors on its first day, with as many as 2,000 people on the bridge at any given time. Within minutes of the official opening, the span began to tilt and rock, causing some pedestrians to grab onto the handrails and inducing motion sickness in others. Two days later, authorities closed the bridge to study the problem.
What investigators found was a classic reinforcing process. According to New Yorker writer John Cassidy in "Rational Irrationality: The Real Reason That Capitalism Is So Crash-Prone," "When a person walks, lifting and dropping each foot in turn, he or she produces a slight sideways force. If hundreds of people are walking in a confined space, and some happen to walk in step, they can generate enough lateral momentum to move a footbridge--just a little. Once the footbridge starts swaying, however subtly, more and more pedestrians adjust their gait to get comfortable, stepping to and fro in synch. As a positive-feedback loop develops between the bridge's swing and the pedestrians' stride, the sideways forces can increase dramatically and the bridge can lurch violently." Engineers came up with the term "synchronous lateral excitation" to describe the phenomenon; locals simply dubbed the span the "Wobbly Bridge."
Princeton economist Hyun Song Shin has been using the Millennium Bridge example for years to dramatize an underlying structural flaw in our current financial system. Like what happened with the bridge, he says, "Financial markets are the supreme example of an environment where individuals react to what's happening around them, and where individuals' actions affect the outcomes themselves." Cassidy sums up the impact of this dynamic as follows: "Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and participants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever a crisis hits, however, the biggest players--banks, investment banks, hedge funds--rush to reduce their exposure, buyers disappear, and liquidity dries up. Where previously there were diverse views, now there is unanimity: everybody's moving in lockstep." When this happens, as it did last year, we all hold onto the handrails for dear life.
The Millennium Bridge reopened in February of 2002, with dozens of shock absorbers in place. Both Cassidy and Shin argue for the need for "stabilizers" of various kinds in our economy. Cassidy concludes: "Our system of oversight fails to account for how sensible individual choices can add up to collective disaster. Rather than blaming the pedestrians for swaying the footway, governments need to reinforce the foundations of the structure." Their concern is that, if we don't address the financial system's fundamental design flaws now, the next disaster might bring the whole bridge down.
What systems lessons can we apply to this challenge of designing "shock absorbers" for our financial markets?
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Bridge photo: Adrian Pingstone
By Janice Molloy
With the days growing shorter and kids heading back to school, fall is definitely in the air. The end of the growing season serves as a tangible reminder that nothing grows forever: not plants, not children--and not companies or product sales or economies.
This is a principle of the living world, and also a principle of systems of all kinds. In systems language, every reinforcing process eventually encounters a limit, or a balancing process. And yet, in the excitement of the growth, or boom, phase, we often seem to forget that "to everything there is a season."
A Decade of Booms and Busts
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, "How I Got Burned by Beanie Babies," Karen Blumenthal looks at lessons from the booms and busts of the past decade, including the housing bubble, the tech bubble, and, yes, the bubble that played out around a brand of stuffed animals called "Beanie Babies." The wild-eyed speculation in each of these situations brought financial success to a few, and financial ruin to many more.
Blumenthal's hope is that by understanding the patterns these rollercoaster rides tend to follow, we can "be more astute in reacting and adjusting our own behavior." Here's what she has observed:
- The biggest bubbles seem to occur during times of rapid and radical innovation. Because of the dramatic nature of the changes, we become susceptible to "bizarre rationalizations," like the idea that home or oil prices could climb forever.
- Once booms get started, people jump on the bandwagon in droves, further boosting prices. As Blumenthal states, "Initial skepticism gives way to curiosity and then escalates into a kind of frenzy, a feeling that you may be the only person on the planet who isn't part of the fun, and you'd better scramble to get in."
- Even knowing that all booms eventually bust, people ignore warnings, thinking that something about this particular trend makes it different from all previous ones.
- Greed runs rampant. Blumenthal notes, "At some point, the bubble reaches a point that is so ridiculous that greed takes over and all common sense must be suspended to continue the myth." She sheepishly admits that she once spent $50 on a $5 "Peace Beanie Baby," falling prey to the illusion that she might one day finance her children's college education with the little stuffed animals.
- Dangerous behavior ensues, as some people desperately try to "keep the party going." This is the stage when unethical or patently unwise actions take place; according to Blumenthal, "It was only after the tech boom started to weaken that WorldCom Inc. began to cheat on its earnings."
Blumenthal concludes that the only people who profit from boom cycles are those who sell on the way up and aren't worried about trying to maximize their profits. She advises most people to invest for the long run: "The only way to survive financial busts is to hang on long enough to outrun them."
Limits to Growth
Knowledge of systems behavior can also help us avoid becoming caught up in the boom-bust dynamic. As Donella Meadows says in Thinking in Systems, "Whenever we see a growing entity, whether it be a population, a corporation, a bank account, a rumor, an epidemic, or sales of a new products, we look for the reinforcing loops that are driving it and for the balancing loops that will ultimately constrain it." The "Limits to Growth" (also known as the "Limits to Success") systems archetype offers a framework for acknowledging and exploring the constraints on unbridled growth.
But tools and guidelines will only get us so far. Escaping from the bubble mentality may necessitate a shift in the Western concepts that "bigger is better," "more is better than less," and "growth for growth's sake." Perhaps only by embracing the reality of limits will we be able to make the most of what we actually have.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.
bubble photo by Jeff Kubina/Creative Commons license (CC) BY-NC-ND
By David W. Packer
"With only a fraction of the recovery money actually out the door, Washington began debating the need for a second round of stimulus amid economic and political crosscurrents." --"Doubts About Obama's Economic Recovery Plan Rise Along With Unemployment" by Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times, July 9, 2009
This news synopsis on the front page of the July 9 edition of the New York Times couldn't help but catch my eye. It's something I've been concerned about for a while, as it focuses on a common systems issue--time delays. Feedback loops and time delays are two major pieces of system structure that dramatically affect what happens over time.
Delays--like motorcycles on a summer day--are everywhere. There are physical ones, such as how long it takes to do something. 
There are psychological ones, such as how long it takes someone to realize and be convinced that something is actually changing in a human system full of noise and extraneous changes. And there are even delays beyond delays--the time it takes to actually start doing something even after recognizing the need; this delay sometimes results from inertia, and sometimes from the false hope that the need will just go away. Finally, there is the delay in how long it takes for the "doing something" to make a difference.
"Results Today" Thinking
Studies show that we almost always underestimate the length of delays, not just by a few percentage points, but by factors of 2, 5, or even 10 or more. We may think a change in what we do will pay off in four months when in fact the impact plays out over several years.
Back to the stimulus plan: A relatively common scenario, I contend, is that we make a change and expect results way too soon because we underestimate the time delays involved. When the outcomes don't happen on our flawed schedule, we declare failure and do something else. Of course, by giving up on the initiative, we will never know whether, given time, it might have created great improvement. In this hypothetical example, we have squandered resources and time, and we have probably stimulated even more short-term "results today" thinking to boot.
Another factor that often compounds the problem is the "worse before better" characteristic of systems. Often, when an action is taken, things actually get worse in the short term before they begin to improve. All of these dynamics, of course, are fodder for detractors, especially in, but not limited to, the political sphere.
Charting the Stimulus
I am not an economist or an expert in stimulus plans, but I do worry about this common scenario playing out and affecting our lives and welfare. Many have expressed disappointment in the lack of tangible economic results of the stimulus package so far, even though we're only six months into a process in which the time delays are clearly some years.
There are two kinds of risks in making an early critique of the program. First, people can be discouraged by the failure to meet their way-too-optimistic expectations, causing confidence to erode and the economy to get even worse (a dangerous reinforcing feedback loop). Second, officials might prematurely boost stimulus spending, which could increase the risk of inflation.
While I do hear designers of the plan talking years, not months, and see news that the spending is just starting to trickle, I yearn for a behavior over time chart that shows the stimulus money authorized, the path of its actual spending, and the expected economic impact. I think such a chart, based on systems principles and having a time dimension of many years, would set expectations, promote a healthy response, and create broad awareness of the system structure at play in this critical time.
Dave Packer is founding partner of the Systems Thinking Collaborative, veteran of the MIT System Dynamics Group and of Digital Equipment Corporation, grandparent of eleven, Ginny Wiley's spouse, and a Red Sox fan, among other things.
photo: Ian Britton/freefoto.com
By Janice Molloy
"Do you need help finding anything?" By the time the third salesperson had asked me the same question during a recent trip to a large home improvement center, I started to smile. My prediction had come true.
Customer service (or lack thereof) is a pet peeve of mine. I don't have studies or statistics to document my claim, but it seems to me that customer service declined precipitously during the free-spending years of the recent economic bubble. Trips to 
the department store meant wandering through racks of clothes in search of a sales clerk or waiting in endless lines for a person to measure my child's foot for new shoes.
In response, I shifted to doing most of my shopping online, where "live chat" gave me the ability to ask questions and get a quick, if impersonal, answer. But I couldn't avoid the grocery store, where clerks absentmindedly scanned my healthy and not-so-healthy food choices while chatting with baggers about their latest crushs.
My speculation on this unfortunate pattern of behavior was that, with consumer spending at an all-time high, retailers didn't feel the need to train their staff on greeting, engaging with, or helping patrons. If I, as a shopper, got frustrated with the lackadaisical treatment and took my business elsewhere, store managers seemed confident that others would flood through the door to replace me--and my dollars.
But the flow of money--and consumers' compulsion to spend it--masked a common, underlying balancing loop: As the number of customers increases, the quality of service often falls. When the quality of service falls, over time, the number of customers drops. Understanding this dynamic (an admittedly simplistic version of extremely complex economic behaviors), when the bottom fell out of the economy last year, I happily speculated that customer service would improve as stores sought to attract and serve the needs of potential purchasers.
Sure enough, salespeople seem to be more solicitous lately. Cashiers smile as they ask if I want chips or a drink with my sandwich. Retailers have realized that, in a tough economy, they can distinguish themselves from their competitors through their service. Likewise, stores can boost sales by encouraging employees to make recommendations and help people find what they're looking for.
During my recent trip to the big-box home center, one of the salesmen tracked down the unusual CFL lightbulb I needed. If he hadn't been attentive to my needs, I might have left without making a purchase. As the economy flickers slightly brighter, I find myself hoping that store managers will continue to push on the customer service wheel. I have a few more home improvement projects to tackle this summer and will need someone to point me in the right direction.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter.
photo: Ian Britton/freefoto.com
I don't know about you, but I get excited every time I read the phrases "vicious cycle," "feedback loop," and "housing bubble" in 
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or other mainstream news source (and I become a road hazard when I hear them mentioned in an NPR report on my commute).
For the first 10 years I worked as managing editor of The Systems Thinker, I felt a bit like a Talmud scholar, reading between the lines of news stories for hints at the structure that was driving the behavior under discussion. With the emergence of two critical global crises--the economic meltdown and climate change--wise observers have begun to use the language of loops and links to get at the root of the behaviors we're now experiencing in a big and painful way.
For those who have been working in the trenches to convince organizations and governmental bodies to adopt a systemic perspective, it would be tempting to kick back and think the work is done. I mean, if an award-winning journalist such as Tom Friedman and Nobel laureate like economist Paul Krugman can look at the world through this lens, then what more can we add?
But as anyone who has applied systems thinking tools to problems within their organization, community, or even family knows, the real challenge is in the implementation. It's all well and good to recognize the feedback loops that prevent a business unit from performing up to potential; it's another thing, though, to then set about using that knowledge to improve the current situation and avoid such quagmires in the future.
We're launching this blog as a way to look at the dynamics at work in our organizations and the world and to explore how a systems understanding can help us take effective actions. We've invited contributors from a wide range of experience and expertise to share their stories, successes and failures, and tried-and-true tips for using systems thinking in action. To us, systems thinking is not an academic activity but a practical toolset that can have a real impact, both in diagnosing the issues holding us back and in creating a more successful tomorrow.
So, welcome and please join us in creating this practice field together!
--Janice Molloy
photo: Nancy Daugherty