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 Vicky Schubert
Regardless of what kind of legislation results from the torrid healthcare battle being waged on Capitol Hill, one notable outcome of the process has been a shift in our awareness of the obesity epidemic that has engulfed the U.S. in the last two decades.
Whether heightened awareness translates into behavio
r change sufficient to reverse the trend will depend on our ability to understand the complex causal relationships driving this shared crisis. Our chances of achieving that kind of behavior-changing understanding got a little better last month with the publication of Thinking in Circles About Obesity, by system dynamicist Tarek Hamid of the Naval Postgraduate School.
Engaging and thorough, Hamid suggests that the solutions to the obesity epidemic need to be as nuanced as the problem, entailing "a whole lot more than food-pyramid images or a new nutritional guideline." The systems thinking perspective he offers highlights the fatal flaws in our commonly held assumptions about energy balance--the dynamic equation between the calories we consume and the energy we expend--and provides practical leverage points for breaking the vicious cycles that are fueling the crisis.
There is no shortage of data documenting the dimensions of the problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over a 20-year period, obesity in American adults has increased by 60%, and obesity in children has tripled. With two-thirds of U.S. adults officially overweight (measured in body mass index, or BMI)--and 30% of those obese--rampant weight gain has emerged as the major healthcare crisis of the day, contributing to many lethal conditions including cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In a study published earlier this year in the journal Health Affairs, it was estimated that over the last 10 years, the annual medical costs associated with obesity in this country have ballooned from about $78 billion a year to around $147 billion.
As Hamid documents in Thinking in Circles, the environmental, physiological, and behavioral causes that have spiraled out of control in such a short time are many and complex. Some obvious factors often cited in the popular media, such as decreased activity levels and increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, offer a variety of possible intervention points. But the highest leverage actions will be focused at the structural level, on prevention rather than remediation, as reflected in the CDC's recommendations for policy-level prevention strategies.
This is where Hamid's work is most insightful, emphasizing the importance of underlying mental models and informed choice in managing our health before problems arise--especially in the formulation of childhood nutrition practices. Pointing to studies that show encouraging results from early intervention, Hamid notes, "targeting children allows us to intervene before obesity-promoting behaviors have become well ingrained."
In his discussion of prevention measures, Hamid suggests that we can bolster children's natural propensity for systems thinking and equip them to manage their own nutritional health through play. Using computer games and other experiential learning methods, children are capable of profoundly changing the way they think about themselves in relation to energy and food.
And even without the aid of simulations, children are more able to regulate their own food intake than we might believe. Hamid helps us see how, as parents and caregivers, we tend to fall prey to the "Shifting the Burden" systems archetype, making what we think are healthy choices on our children's behalf. By mistakenly assuming that children are incapable of choosing wisely, we shift the burden of nutritional responsibility to ourselves and rob them of developing the fundamental cognitive skills they'll need to manage their health in our absence.
Also known as the "Addiction" archetype, this pattern lies at the root of many other situations in which people turn to "quick-fix" solutions to solve deep-seated issues--substance abuse, gambling, workaholism, just to name a few. One clear lesson from this book is that our job is not to impose better choices on our children, but to model healthy behavior and support their ability to make good decisions. That's the kind of systems thinking that will have far-reaching implications not just for our healthcare policies and insurance costs, but for our society as a whole.
Vicky Schubert is marketing director at Pegasus Communications.
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
As we struggle to meet today's challenges, we're t
empted to do more with less in our organizations and lives. And yet the key to accomplishing our goals may be to do less with more--more focus, attention, and sense of purpose. In this selection from her book It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized (Viking Compass, 2003), Pegasus board member Marilyn Paul highlights the value of focus as a means to make the most of our precious time and energy.
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Our attention is like a powerful light. We can illuminate what we focus on. Yet with so much to do, so many options, so many goals, it is easy to scatter your energies to the winds and get overwhelmed. You can learn to focus on what you truly want, which begins with knowing what is important to you. This task is lifework. Managing your attention, learning to focus, is a big part of accomplishing what you truly want.
Part of learning to be present is defining your priorities and then staying with them. There are goods reasons not to define your priorities. Perhaps you pile on tasks in order to avoid getting to know yourself and your deepest aspirations. Sherry said, "I am completely busy, I am never home. My schedule is full to bursting. But I am too busy to feel much or to think about the things that are bothering me. Sometimes, I think that's a good thing, but other times I am vaguely aware of a deep fear that is driving me."
Prioritizing strengthens your sense of who you are and what you value. It also sets a virtuous cycle in motion. As you get to know yourself, you find it easier to set priorities. You are not spread so thin, and you see more clearly what has meaning for you.
Sometimes people don't focus when they are working because they feel they don't have the time to concentrate. It's hard to focus because there is so much to do. However, lack of focus leads to poor quality work, which then needs to be redone, which increases the feeling of pressure by adding more to your to-do list. This is a vicious cycle that can be interrupted by learning to focus on what you are doing well.
We have so many choices. When we focus we give ourselves the gift of depth and presence. We can focus on what is important to us, and we can bring our attention to the present moment. Both of these types of focusing will deepen the quality of our lives.
Life is a practice of coming back to the richness of the present moment, and coming back again.
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