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Fueling New Cycles of Success with Systems Thinking

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By Janice Molloy

In the best-selling book Good to Great, author Jim Collins introduced a notion that should strike a chord with anyone familiar with systems thinking: the “flywheel.” A flywheel is a heavy metal disk mounted on an axle that helps a machine maintain a regular speed. It takes a lot of effort to get a flywheel going, but once it has built up a certain amount of momentum, it is hard to stop.

In systems language, the flywheel is a reinforcing process, a dynamic that builds on itself over time, a virtuous cycle (except, of course, when it is running in the opposite direction than we want it to, but that’s a different story!). Collins uses this metaphor to illustrate the process through which organizations launch and sustain lasting success: “No matter how short or long it took, every good-to-great transformation followed the same basic pattern—accumulating momentum, turn by turn of the flywheel—until buildup transformed into breakthrough.”
 
It’s no secret that the past several years have proven challenging across the board. From economic meltdown to environmental disasters, we’ve all been affected by the complex, big-systems crises that have rocked our world. Things haven’t been much easier on an organizational level. Most of us are facing the challenge of doing more with less, of pushing harder for each small victory, of tackling higher levels of intricacy and urgency in everything we do.

But what if we could set that flywheel in motion in our organizations and lives? What if we could make changes at the structural level—real, fundamental shifts—to turn vicious cycles into virtuous ones? What if we could see underlying trends and intervene before they reached a tipping point? How might things be different if we could understand the role we play in creating the situations we are a part of—and learn to think and act differently to achieve the results we want?
 
In designing this year’s Systems Thinking in Action® Conference, “Fueling New Cycles of Success,” we’ve assembled a stellar line-up of speakers and other contributors to introduce and explore proven tools, inspiring ideas, and hard-fought lessons for accelerating momentum in a positive direction. Keynote presenters include Dayna Baumeister, Andy Hargreaves, Daniel H. Kim, Frances Moore Lappé, and Peter Senge. To enhance the experience, Kelvy Bird will capture the plenary content in vivid graphic recordings, and Tim Merry and Marc Durkee will enliven the proceedings with poetry and music. We’ll be adding videos of many of the conference contributors throughout the summer; see the end of this post for a clip of the amazing Frances Moore Lappé.

As Jim Collins remarked, “When people begin to feel the magic of momentum—when they begin to see tangible results, when they can feel the flywheel beginning to build speed—that’s when the bulk of people line up to throw their shoulders against the wheel and push.” At this November’s conference, we will share ways to spark that magic through the power of systems thinking. 

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.