If you’ve not yet got into Systems Thinking, now is more important than ever.

AI brings the promise of big productivity gains – but so many optimisation efforts deliver nothing. Worse, they can take you in the wrong direction, faster – exacerbating the very issues you’re trying to solve.

Why? Often the things that look like the problem are just symptoms. They’re usually the most visible and measurable activities – and therefore appealing to focus on. At best, it’s like taking painkillers instead of treating the underlying cause of the illness.

I see it all the time – organisations attempting local optimisations to the wrong part of the system, blind to the knock-on effects. Fixes that make bottlenecks worse, and costs taken out in one place, only to reappear elsewhere – often bigger than the original saving.

GenAI makes it even more tempting to fix the wrong problems. It’s good at generating documents, writing more code, handling support queries. None of which are directly value-add activities, but they are visible and measurable.

There’s a real risk of just getting busier with busywork.

That’s why you need to step back and look at the system as a whole. Map end-to-end value streams – across people, process and technology. Identify pain points, bottlenecks, and constraints. Understand how the work flows, and what’s actually causing the outcomes you’re seeing.

That’s systems thinking in a nutshell.

A lot of the theory-heavy books make it sound more complex than it is. It’s why I’m a big fan of The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Yes, it’s a corny business novel – but it’s one of the most practical intros to systems thinking you’ll find.

When you take a systematic approach, more often than not, you’ll find the real problems aren’t where the pain is, and rather than playing whack-a-mole patching problems, you’ll uncover opportunities to make changes that deliver real, lasting impact 🙌