Welcome to SystemsWay Academy, where we help people see systems clearly so they can get systems to work the way they want. We don't need to tell you what systems are. You experience systems everywhere, at work and outside of work. At work we are surrounded by HR systems, finance systems, product development systems, software development systems, incident management, bug management, and the list goes on endlessly. Outside of work we live inside transportation systems, political systems, criminal justice systems, and once again the list goes on. We humans are surrounded by systems and immersed in systems every moment of our lives. It just happens that many of these systems are sub-optimal and some are outright dysfunctional. And the bitter irony is that the people who suffer most inside them are the very people who designed them, built them, and run them every single day.

This irony is particularly puzzling for systems inside corporations, because systems at work are sub-optimal or dysfunctional not because competitors sabotaged them or outsiders interfered. The systems in corporations are designed, led, managed, and operated by the very employees who suffer inside them. Employees crib about dysfunctional systems all the time and many work towards fixing them , but the success rate is dismal to say the least. Unfortunately there is no one to fix these systems other than the people of the systems themselves. Bringing in outside consultants is an option — but chances are they deliver short-term visible success on a PowerPoint deck and leave the system in a bigger mess than before.

So how should one go about solving or preventing organizational dysfunction? If you are thinking SystemsWay can give you solutions to your organizational dysfunction, you have gotten SystemsWay completely wrong. No one understands your systems better than you and your people, and only they can solve your problems, yet they are failing, so let us understand why. People will always come up with solutions that make sense to their understanding of systems. But what if that understanding is itself wrong or sub-optimal? Then the answer is not to seek a better solution — it is to question the understanding by which you judge solutions in the first place. And how do you build a better understanding? Your understanding of systems is a function of your thinking, and your thinking is a function of two things — the thinking paradigm you use and how hard you think. So thinking harder does improve your understanding of systems — but only when your thinking paradigm is already compatible with the systems you are dealing with. When the two are out of sync, the answer is not to think harder; it is to seek a better thinking paradigm. This is the harder concept to grasp.

Let us explain with an example. People with a mythological thinking paradigm developed an understanding of rain as controlled by gods — and the only solutions that made sense to them were more temples and more elaborate rituals. It took hundreds of years and an entirely new analytical thinking paradigm to develop a better understanding through atmospheric science — and suddenly completely different solutions began to make sense. The thinking paradigm had to change before the solutions could change. We are not saying you have a mythological thinking paradigm when designing, leading, and operating organizational systems. We are saying something more precise — you are using an analytical thinking.