“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than ‘static snapshots.” – Peter Senge.
As a leader, when you’re juggling multiple demands on your time, there are a lot of moving parts, and complexity keeps ramping up, it can be really hard to take the time to pause, zoom out, hover above, and see the bigger picture and appreciate how the moving parts are connected and interacting.
For example, are you focused on being in service of the wider organisational community, or even of the wider network of stakeholders outside the company? How far does your leadership legacy reach? Or are you focused on just the people around you and their immediate needs?
Are you focused on ensuring your people are working at a sustainable pace, that they have time to renew their energy through rest or creativity? Or are you focused purely on relentless productivity at the expense of sustained high performance, prioritising the needs of the person who shouts the loudest or can pull the highest rank?
Are your decisions and strategies creative, based on long-term thinking, multiple perspectives and taking the whole picture and all its moving parts into account? Or is your focus narrow, dismissive, reactive, with decisions made by you alone because you haven’t had time to build trust or grant autonomy, or thought to invite your people into the decision-making process?
Developing awareness of the wider system and using the rich information it offers you to effectively guide your thinking, your decisions, and your caring is a key skill for today’s leaders to master.
In order to understand and effectively navigate the wider system, its interdependencies, relationships, and dynamics that exist among various elements and stakeholders, you have to build and nurture your network both internally and across the wider reach of your organisation.
This would enable you to consider the broader context and long-term implications of your decisions, and you could anticipate and address potential unintended consequences.
This type of awareness enables you to make informed choices that benefit the entire system, rather than focusing solely on individual components or short-term gains.
And you can’t do that if you’re stuck in the long grass, pulling weeds.
If you’re keen to explore how you can proactively get out of the weeds, get in touch.
With the support of the Leadership Circle Profile™️ 360° Assessment, we can explore your leadership effectiveness in your current context, as well as your patterns of thought and beliefs that underpin your behaviours, so that you can expand your self-awareness, awaken your potential, maximise your effectiveness, and be the inspiring, systemic thinking leader others choose to follow.
