This is the second law of systems thinking from Peter Senge’s classic book “The Fifth Discipline: The Art And Practice Of The Learning Organization.” The reason the system pushes back harder the harder you push is due to “compensating feedback : when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention” (p. 58).
We have a compensating feedback loop at work in my state. Due to a severe budget crisis, we are cutting funds to K-12 and higher education, and we already spend less on this than almost any other state. We really need to attract new businesses and new jobs to the state, but the high tech businesses with the best jobs will balk at a state where they cannot have access to a highly skilled workforce and where the families of their employees will be forced into a substandard public education system. The money we save in the short term is likely to cost us more money in the long term. Make a different change in the current system (i.e. cut money from something else) and it will have its own compensating feedback loop.
If you want different results, you have to face the fact that you probably can’t get what you want with your current system. The leverage lies in creating new systems to generate new results, not in expecting broken systems to produce the same or better results.
Push your system and the people in it as hard as you want and you might get short term results, but you will inevitably create new problems and probably never see how your heroic efforts contributed to the mounting malaise.
There is a reason why you are having to push harder on your system, and unless and until you discover that reason and address it, you are chasing your tail around the wrong learning loop.
Related Posts:
The Sigmoid Curve And The Paradox Of Change
Today’s Problems Come From Yesterday’s Solutions
ACT Change Theory: Create An Emergent System
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This is great Bret. Some people call this “thinking outside the box”. I disagree with that actually. I prefer diagonal thinking. You’re still constrained by boundaries (the box) but you can find new ways to approach the problem and therefore generate new solutions.
In the case of the budget crisis that is the box we live in. Can’t get outside it so we better find new ways to solve the problem of delivering education and attracting high-tech business if we want to succeed as a state.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
I disagree slightly, Paul. There is no reason we have to be constrained by the box. We created the box. If the box no longer works, sitting in a different corner of the box is not the solution. I agree with your point about finding new ways to delivering education and attracting business as necessary, but they should also be part of other features of your new box and not simply adjustments to our old box. Too much box!
Thanks! Bret
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I think we see the “box” differently. The box isn’t the solution or the problem. The box is the reality within which our solutions must fit. For example, solutions shouldn’t be illegal. The law therefore becomes your box not what works or doesn’t work.
I hope we’d agree it to be career and individually limiting to implement solutions that would land you in prison. Therefore, any solution must fit within this legal framework but that doesn’t stop us from throwing out something that no longer works and trying something new.
Diagonal thinking isn’t about putting lipstick on the pig. It’s about looking at problems differently and finding innovative and creative solutions while understanding the limits of reality.
I guess we may have to agree to slightly disagree. Though I think we may be saying the same thing differently.
Thanks Bret.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Yep, we are hung up on the box. If the box defines your reality, then your list of possible solutions is limited by the parameters of the box. Get outside the box, change the assumptions, and you open up new solution sets. Pigs with lipstick? Why, there aren’t any of those running around Nevada these days
Thanks! Bret
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Thanks Bret. Always enjoy the dialogue and perspective. ~ Paul
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
March 17th, 2010 at 12:08 am
Back at you, Paul! thanks, Bret
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