Category Archives: Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems

Reflections on the Systems Thinking/Leadership workshop at MIT Sloan.

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As part of my recent trip to Boston, I attended a Leadership/systems thinking workshop at MIT taught by Peter Senge. The goal of that workshop was to pair teams of Leadership Lab (or “L-lab”) students with various organizations of different sizes and scopes. Among the organizations represented were Caterpillar, West Elm, and OCP. This arrangement had a dual purpose: to assist these organizations in developing their sustainability initiatives through systems thinking, and to provide real-life learning opportunities and challenges for the students of L-lab.

I went as a part of NOS (Noroeste Sustentable), a small NGO based in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. My role as an attendee was primarily to provide support to Alejandro Robles, the organization’s director. This was, of course, an amazing opportunity to learn about systems thinking from Peter Senge. But I also went with “half an eye”—as I told one of the instructors—towards learning about the Leadership MBA they offer at MIT Sloan (and PhD opportunities, as well).

Systems thinking is a framework for thought and leadership developed from the multidisciplinary approach to engineering provided by systems dynamics. Systems dynamics quantitatively and qualitatively studies the components of physical systems, their interactions, and tries to model and predict otherwise unpredictable behaviors that occur from the complexity of the interactions involved. Systems thinking takes this discipline and and focuses on teaching people how to view the world in terms of a complex set of interactions, which are predominantly hidden and inaccessible to our firsthand experience.

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Thinking in Systems

A systems view on dieting and losing weight.

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Most of us suspect that diets just don’t work. Despite the fact that every six months or so, a new diet comes along touting a new and amazing way to lose weight, there’s a good chance that for a large chunk of the population, it won’t be effective. As usual, it comes down to the individual’s “strength of will” or “mental ability” to constrain themselves and only eat particular foods, or particular quantities of foods.

I prefer a different approach.

Why not, instead of sitting there dreaming about what we could eat that we’re holding ourselves back from eating, we learn how to stack the deck in our favor? Why not set up the dominoes of our life so that we find ourselves eating what we should be eating, without having to drive ourselves with an iron fist? By the way, that’s totally possible.

The principles of systems thinking (and the specifics of the body), allow us to explore systemic changes that we can make, so that it doesn’t come down to “strength of will”—whatever that means.

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Biomechanic Issues, Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

The language of “static stretching:” How to identify systemic archetypes using linguistic clues.

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Static stretching is one of the most entrenched exercise habits in the western hemisphere, especially for runners. It doesn’t do any favors to our running economy, our injury rates, our long-term development of power—and yet it endures.

You would think this means that we have an unabashed cultural acceptance of stretching, but that isn’t so. No matter how positively we speak of stretching, or how much we proselytize its benefits, the language that we use to describe it (and its effects) continue to carry hints that it isn’t—and will never be—a real solution.

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Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

Increasing the body’s percentage of liquid assets is how we accelerate athletic development.

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The human body is an economic system. If only we treated it that way. The ways in which the magazines and the latest trends compel us to go about exercise and physical development just don’t observe this reality.

Because the body functions like an economy, the surest way to achieve any goal is creating the conditions for growth in that direction. This is why I speak in terms of liquid assets: assets which can be sold very quickly and without losing market value in the process. Increasing the liquidity of our body’s relevant nutrients—fats and carbohydrates, to name two—is the very first step towards entering a cycle of investment to drive the body’s economy in the direction we want—even when “growth” corresponds to growing in the direction of a lower body mass.

Even when we’re talking about running for the sole purpose of being skinny, constraining calories just won’t cut it. By forcing the body to implement austerity measures (through dieting), we destroy its ability to grow in any direction. Even though we’ll achieve skinniness in the short-term, doing so will compromise the body’s ability to maintain it. In systems-speak, this is a classic example of Shifting the Burden.

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Thinking in Systems

It’s really all about sustainability: Reflecting on the Sustainable Brands conference at MIT Sloan.

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Earlier this week, I attended the Sustainable Brands: New Metrics conference hosted by MIT Sloan in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a privilege to observe and participate in an event where business leaders have come together to act on climate change and other systemic risks. At New Metrics, the hot topic was, well, metrics: the cutting-edge of what we can measure statistically and probabilistically, with the goal of applying it not to measure climate change per se, but to the impact that leading businesses are achieving, in taking us towards a sustainable future.

One of the core philosophies of this conference is that brands—the web of ideas that surround a particular product of service—already have a great amount of influence in shaping society. Brands can become the leaders for creating the kind of society (and culture of social responsibility) that will drive a sustainable future. Businesses and corporations are increasingly beginning to realize that there is no future but a sustainable future. New Metrics (and Sustainable Brands) offers the platform for intellectual, social and corporate leaders to organize around the idea that sustainability and social responsibility must form the core, rather than the fringe, of how brands address society’s present and future needs.

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Defining our Terms, Thinking in Systems

How philosophy powers athletic achievement: a personal anecdote.

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Earlier this summer I ran the HTC race in Oregon, a well-known, hundred-plus mile relay. I was part of an excellent and enthusiastic Reed College team. I was given the more . . . motivating, if you will, leg of the race. It consisted of a set of three stretches—legs 5, 17, and 24—totaling about 21 miles. The last stretch included an 850-ft hill. I engage with running as a form of expression, and not a form of propulsion. Nowhere does the contrast between expression and propulsion become more stark than when a single group of people—each and every person with their own metaphors, mental models, and training histories—run together up a hill in heat that closes in on the double digits.

As was the case on that particular hill.

Now, I’m not the fastest runner out there. And, I gotta say: should precedent and probability have the final say, I’ll never be. But over the years, I have developed my running to be quite effortless—and therefore, quite fast. I like to run without effort, and fully engaged, like a well-oiled machine where every tiny part is playing its part in exactly the right way, all the pistons moving in perfect synchrony, all of the forces which course through my body coursing through it in exactly the right vectors. This is a story about what effortlessness means, what it does for you, and what it feels like. But more importantly I share what are, in my opinion, the most basic ideas of how to replicate it it.

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Biomechanic Issues, Thinking in Systems

The “hip complex:” The reference point for the center of gravity.

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Most of us know that when we run (or just walk around), our weight should be on our hips. This allows us to move faster and more powerfully, and to prevent injury. It’s also often said that the hips are the “center of gravity.”

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The “center of gravity” is represented by the red dot.

All this is completely true. But what does “center of gravity” mean, anyway?

The “center of gravity” is the point in a body around which the resultant torque (or “resultant force“) due to gravity and other sources of mechanical energy vanishes. In other words, all of the forces that are generated by the body, as well as their interactions with the earth’s gravitational field, all get canceled out at the center of gravity.

The resultant force. This isn’t a commonly used term, but it’s one whose implications we should understand if we want to become safe, effective runners.

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Defining our Terms, Thinking in Systems

On “False Performance.”

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I believe that the only way to be as fast as I wish I am, is to think myself exactly as strong as I actually am. I constantly overreach, and even more often arrogate capabilities to myself that I don’t actually have.

Want to know how I get injured?

I blind myself to the interface between my body and the world, and I use willful ignorance to dedicatedly circumvent certain truths about the world—truths that accelerate at 9.8m/s² (32.1ft/s²), and, in my case, slam into my feet with around 450 lbs of force. Somehow, I have to bully myself into greater awareness, and greater humility about myself and the world. Somehow, I have to find a way to train healthy and safe.

And to that end, I use the term false performance. I invite you to use it as well.

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Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

4-count breathing: An exercise for runners, meditators, commandos, and everyone else.

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4-count breathing is well-known as a relaxing exercise, a form of meditation, and a tactical combat tool. This is a very useful tool for runners, because it helps the body function aerobically at a very high level of performance. For those who don’t know what I’m referring to, 4-count breathing is a technique that consists of the following steps:

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Thinking in Systems

Society, running, and biomechanics: A systemic exploration (and a hint of future topics).

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Systems thinking is more than a theory or a scientific trend. Systems thinking is an idea, an understanding that reality organizes itself into systems. All the tiny different parts of reality—regardless of whether you cut up the pie into atoms, physical forces, or currents of social change—are interconnected to one another. They all interact in chaotic, highly unpredictable ways.

Systems thinking was designed to try to explain, model, and predict how “stuff” that seems to be completely unrelated from other “stuff”—like externalities—interact to create highly complex behavior: creating a system. Strictly speaking, a system isn’t built out of parts; it’s built out of interactions. It’s possible to have a collection of parts, but as long as they’re not interacting with each other in some particular way—as long as they don’t form part of a structure (a dynamic structure in this case)—they aren’t a system.

Therefore, systems thinking allows us to model how different “chunks” of reality interact.

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