186 Leading with NLP
boundaries and horizons
Systems change over time and it takes time for the effects to
show up in the system. The further you can see into the past
and into the future, the more useful connections you can
make to the present. Boundaries are really horizons – look a
little bit further and you will see over them.
Often we do not look far enough to see causes and pat-
terns and so we do not learn from our experience. In systems
an effect can occur a long time after its cause because it takes
time to work its way around the system. We get a very real ex-
perience of this when we do hard physical work one day but
our muscles do not feel it until the next day. Suppose we did
not feel it for a week? How easy would it be to connect with
the work we did a week ago?
In business, because feedback from actions can take a long
time to appear, managers are sometimes promoted too soon.
Yet what looks like success in the short term may have left a
ActionBoundary BoundaryHorizon Horizon