My Frustration with Systems

If you find Systems Thinking hard to understand and apply, you are not alone.

Systems exist everywhere around us. Nature is a system. Your body is a system. Every day you travel in a (transport) system. The politics that affect your life is a system. Your family is a system. You work in a system of teams and sub-teams.

Learning how to decode and work with systems makes you more effective at work, makes you a better friend and family member, and brings you better mental and emotional health.

Learning to work with systems is everything. Failure to design proper systems can cost lives – emergency room workflows must be designed to save every single second. Mis-diagnosing systemic problems can cost livelihoods; have you noticed how campaigns to “shop local” does not save neighbourhood stores? Because they fail to address the much bigger problem at hand (real estate regulation). In a less tragic but more common scenario, failure to see how your actions impact the system gets you classified as “an asshole” at work, no matter how well-meaning your actions might be.

Learning to work with systems is so important that you would think it’s the first thing to be taught in schools and marriage preparation classes, explained on the first day at work, and made a compulsory part of leadership development. But it’s not.

And I get why, I truly do.

Firstly, the number of technical terms and tools is mind-boggling - mental models, Root-Cause Analysis, Fishbone, Causal Loop, Agent-based modelling, Ladder of Inference… I came across a very well-meaning website that listed 75 tools of systems thinking. 75! Where do you even start? It’s enough to make a person want to run screaming in the opposite direction.

Secondly, the people dealing with hardcore systemic problems – the messy wicked problems like poverty, healthcare, climate change and not systems like designing a car (we’ll get to the difference later) – will tell you that systems thinking is frustrating and humbling. You cannot control the outcome but must go through the process anyway. You learn about your insignificance whilst trying to maintain a sense of self-agency.

Finally, succeeding in systems is contrary to how most of us were taught from young to succeed: win-or-lose. Target accomplished. The notion that one cannot “win” at systems (but can only ensure it gets healthier over time) is a complete anathema to our concept of success. Who wants to raise their hands and say: “I volunteer to not be successful”? Yet that is exactly the mentality that working with systems requires.

In short, why systems thinking is not more widely used boils down to 3 things: ease of knowledge, emotional steadfastness and the right mentality.

Frustrated that the world needs better systems thinking but that we are still so bad at it, confounded with all the literature and tools, I thought to myself: what if we could cut through all the noise? Can we start to unlock complex problems with a few key principles applied with common sense? Can we make meaningful changes in our world, improve relationships and bring stakeholders along with us?

The answer is yes.

I’ve found 3 principles, which accompanied by certain approaches, have so far worked across a wide range of complex problems I had to tackle.

These are hard-earned principles through 2 decades of experience working on large-scale system changes in the Singapore public service. In 2020 at the end of a very fulfilling career with the Singapore government that started right after graduation from Oxford, I asked myself: what skills have I gained that others would find valuable?

It was not an easy question to answer. Throughout my career, I had been mandated to serve 6 different agencies with very different foci: defense, labour, grassroots organisation, public sector innovation, land transport, design. I had relatively little sectoral depth.

I left the public service not because I didn’t enjoy it anymore, but because I had moved to France for family reasons. I did not speak French, plus I was not a French citizen so doing something public-sector related was out of the question.

My main concern then was: so what do I do now?

I realised that whilst moving around agencies did nothing to build my sectoral expertise, it built an important skill – the skill of seeing someone’s world with new eyes, joining the dots, and working across boundaries to make change happen. The skill of systems thinking. So I set up a consultancy, MindTheSystem, dedicated to helping others navigate complex systems through pragmatic, actionable training for senior executives.

The voice of an ex-colleague whom I loved and respected very much, Iva (who herself is driving organisational development today), came flooding back to me: “Where other people see problems, you see systems.”

It is my hope now to share with you how to see beyond problems into the system. And what to do with that system. I write this series not with a view to provide step-by-step tools, I write with a hope that my stories give you courage and moral support to continue in your own journey. You need to know that everyone struggles with this, the journey is messy and frustrating, you will have keen moments of self-doubt and struggle with inadequacy… and it’s ok. You are not alone.

I do not claim to be an expert in systems thinking. I do not claim to have researched the subject thoroughly. I read whatever that interests me, and sometimes I find connections. I’m more of a learn-by-doing kind of person; everyday I’m still learning new things, more often than not through failing. So if you’re here looking for statistically validated approaches, you’re looking in the wrong place. What you’ll get here instead are stories of one woman’s journey with systems, so that hopefully you will learn from her mistakes.

Are you ready?

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash