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 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 Vicky Schubert
It was at an Astoria, Oregon inn, under a massive bridge that crosses the Columbia River, that Ruth Stiehl and Marilyn Lane first decided to teach people about systems by taking them on a raft trip. "As we talked," explains Ruth, "the imagery of the river was
right there, shaping our conversation. In its own emergent way, the river presented itself as an experiential tool to help people see the systems they were part of."
In her work with community college curriculum developers, and in her book The Assessment Primer, Ruth had frequently used the river as a metaphor for illustrating useful systems concepts. Recently hired by Clatsop Community College to support its accreditation initiative, she impressed Marilyn--a 12-year board member for the college--with her deep, yet simple, approach to defining institutional outcomes. As the curriculum director for a K-12 school district, Marilyn saw an opportunity to expand the impact of their work to include a broader system.
The two brought together a group of faculty and administrators from pre-K through community college for an experiential training pilot. After an exciting run on the Deschutes River--a Columbia tributary 100 miles to the north--the rafters returned to a classroom for some reflection. Ruth laid down a rope and put segments across it to illustrate how the group related to each phase of the education process as separate and distinct--early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school, community college.
Ruth asked the group to show what it would look like if the learning were more systemic. The participants drew the rope into a circle, a perfect segue for talking about the river. "If you ask most people to draw a picture of a river," notes Ruth, "they will draw a line. It might squiggle a little bit or have some bands, but it will just be a line. And when you actually look at a river system, it's not a line at all. It's a matter of streams and tributaries--a complex basin."
Additionally, a river is dynamic; it goes someplace. Unlike a pond, it has energy, it has engagement, and it recreates itself. When you stand way back and take a macro view, the whole hydraulic system keeps the earth alive. "We invited the group to think about education in those terms," Ruth explains. "Education is a vital, dynamic resource that keeps our communities alive. If you have a nursing program at a community college, the educational basin includes all the feeder schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, social service agencies, and people who contribute to the education, while the college provides that primary stream that connects it all together."
The successful pilot led Ruth and Marilyn to establish the White Water Institute, a nonprofit organization that brings a river-based experiential systems thinking curriculum to community college administrators, community groups, and individuals seeking deeper connections between their personal and professional lives. The Institute uses professional guides to help groups navigate a twelve-mile stretch of the Deschutes, through rapids rated from class two to class four. In the process, participants learn about teamwork and gain awareness of the nature of organic systems, particularly in terms of flow and change.
Key to teaching about systems, Ruth believes, is helping people shift their perspective to look for patterns. "When you look at a river, you're looking at processes. In processes there are patterns that you can learn to observe. We're terribly deficient, particularly in our educational systems, in recognizing patterns, because we don't make the effort to get far enough away from things to see the patterns that exist." The river experience gives participants the distance they need to recognize how prevailing educational and organizational paradigms prevent schools from operating as healthy, living systems.
Neither easy nor quick, the lessons of the river can take a long time to implement. Participants come to recognize that real transformation requires patience and persistence. As one rafter observed, "Patterns of behavior are difficult to alter. Ways of thinking after years of practice are not as flexible as I may wish. I feel supported by systems thinking skills. However, when I'm under stress I fail to remember them, so I need to go and remember what I learned on the river."
Vicky Schubert is marketing director at Pegasus Communications.
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
The systems thinking community is all abuzz about Daniel Pink. If you don't know him, he's the author of Free Agent Nati
on: The Future of Working for Yourself; A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future; and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. He also writes articles for publications including Wired and the New York Times, and a public television special, "Daniel Pink: Living on the Right Side of the Brain," premiered on PBS this spring.
Since A Whole New Mind was released in 2005, FOPs (friends of Pegasus) have been extolling Pink's virtues. So after months of being wait-listed at the library, I finally got my hands on the book to see what all the excitement is about.
Seeing the Big Picture
I'll write about Pink's work in more depth sometime in the not-too-distant future, because, as his proponents point out, A Whole New Mind is chock full of fascinating material that is highly relevant to the work we do at Pegasus. In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here's a snippet from the chapter named "Symphony":
"In any symphony, the composer and the conductor have a variety of responsibilities. They must make sure that the brass horns work in synch with the woodwinds, that the percussion instruments don't drown out the violas. But perfecting those relationships--important though it is--is not the ultimate goal of their efforts. What conductors and composers desire--what separates the long remembered from the quickly forgotten--is the ability to marshal these relationships into a whole whose magnificence exceeds the sum of its parts."
Pink continues: "[T]he Conceptual Age . . . demands the ability to grasp the relationships between relationships. This meta-ability goes by many names--systems thinking, gestalt thinking, holistic thinking. I prefer to think of it simply as seeing the big picture." He goes on to say, "Seeing the big picture is fast becoming a killer app in business. . . . Daniel Goleman writes about a study of executives at fifteen large companies: ‘Just one cognitive ability distinguished star performers from average: pattern recognition, the ‘big picture' thinking that allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from a welter of information around them and to think strategically far into the future" (from Working with Emotional Intelligence, Bantam, 1998).
Comments like these are obviously music to the ears of those of us who believe in the value of systems thinking for improving our organizations and our world. What do you think of Pink's perspective on the skills and abilities that will be crucial for success in the new millennium?
To Guide Your Own Discussions
Pink recently posted two discussion guides on his website, one for business and one for educators.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.