Change and Challenge 169that his business, recently ensconced in its gleaming high-
technology new headquarters, does not revert to trading in
its familiar traditional hallowed way. To make a change with
the least effort, and to make the change stick, you need to
understand how the system works, which brings us to the
third leadership skill: systemic thinking.
systems thinking
What is systems thinking? It is predicting and influencing a
system by understanding its underlying structure. What is a
system? It is an entity that works as a whole through the in-
teraction of its parts. Our bodies are systems, made up of
smaller systems – the circulatory system, the digestive system
and the nervous system. Our beliefs and values are a system.
Our business organizations are complex systems. We live in
systems – the natural environment, the weather, even the
solar system – and take part in political, economic and reli-
gious systems. We deal with systems all the time, it is only
when we try to change them that we feel their power. Sys-
tems are not as simple as they often look and they refuse to
behave in neat, straightforward, linear ways. Trying to
change them may result in them slipping back to where they
were originally or cause unwanted, unforeseen side-effects.
So, leaders cannot effectively change anything, either them-
selves or their business, without working with some aspects
of systems thinking.
A system always does more than the sum of its parts.
Understanding the connections between the parts is the key
to understanding how a system works. We are taught analytic
thinking – breaking things down into parts in order to un-
derstand them – but analysis can never give understanding,
it cannot tell you how the system works when it all works
together. The ability to see how the parts fit together into a
whole is synthesis. Analysis gives description. Synthesis gives
understanding.