How systems thinking saved my life?
By: Nicolas Diaz
Tags: Systems Thinking, Personal Growth, Decisions, Community, Life Lessons

Every day we face different kinds of decisions that we have to make and those decisions build our future, as Edwin Markham says “Choices are the hinges of destiny.”, so for a long time I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the right decisions, I encountered myself reading amazing books, such as Principles by Ray Dalio, Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman and the undoing project, like many others. But after spending time trying to improve my decision-making process I realized that decision-making is highly related to perspective and perception.

Therefore, I wanted to understand how perspective and perception are created, and how can I apply the knowledge that comes from understanding that knowledge.

After talking to some people about it, my teacher recommended me to read The fifth discipline by Peter Senge, honestly after I read the book for the first time I found myself with more questions than answers, but I enjoyed it because it challenged my approach to problems and situations.

The first thing that I realized is that “Doing the obvious thing does not produce an obvious outcome”.

Then, I found some useful principles that helped me (and I hope them to help you) to integrate a small portion of systems thinking into my perception:

-Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions, which means that the cause or causes of a problem have a time gap (also known as a delay).

-The harder you push, the harder the system pushes you back.

-The cure can be worse than the disease.

-Faster is slower.

-Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

-Small changes can produce big results-,but the areas of high leverage are almost the least obvious.

-Dividing an elephant in two doesn’t produce two small elephants

-There is no blame.

Now, let’s talk about how these concepts saved my life.

I would say that before being introduced to systems thinking and complexity I was blind, what I would call “Living without really living” because I was unaware of the fact that “we’re are controlled by forces that we don’t understand yet” as Peter Senge states, so I discovered the magic of learning and trying to understand our reality, the power of creating knowledge with people working on other disciplines, using dialogue and going to the “frontiers of knowledge”, which helped me to be changed my perception about my career and make more accurate decisions, thereby migrating from thinking in terms of snapshots(cause and effect) to focusing on relations, which also helped me to analyze and reflect (or at least try) in every moment of my life.

Immersing in the discipline of systems thinking presented a lot of challenges for me, I’ll talk about them in another article, but I’m sure that it’s worth a shot because one thing is clear and it’s that I’m just getting started and the journey has been amazing, also I know that the road ahead would never end and probably that’s the most exciting thing.

Finally, I just want to invite you to discover the amazing field of complexity, chaos, and systems thinking, because in my opinion, it could change your life and the life of people around you, the main reason is that probably you could understand your reality more accurately, therefore, adapt in a better way to it, and design a decsion making process that “works” for you. As Hypatia remarks “Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”

Thank you santiago rios olaya for your comments :)