Systems Thinking provides us with useful insights how organizational systems work. The insights are often surprising in the way they help explain common dysfunctions in organizations. It is a pity that beyond the field of organizational scientists it doesn’t seem to be known very well. Systems Thinking is part of the foundation of Agile: Agile scaling frameworks like LeSS and SAFe both explicitly mention Systems Thinking in their underlying principles. Yet, rarely do I come across agile coaches that even have a mediocre understanding of Systems Thinking. Most have even never heard of it. If you really want to understand the barriers of agile in organizations, both Systems Thinking and Complexity Theory, also not that well-known, are crucial. Because even agile coaches or should I say especially agile coaches, fall into the traps of local optima and symptomatic solutions. So let’s explore how Systems Thinking can help in building high-performing teams.
What can you expect from this article?
- A basic understanding of the Shifting the Burden archetype
- Insights how building a team can have unexpected side-effects
- Insights in the consequences in applying quick fixes instead of fundamental solutions
- Insight in how to build a high-performing team that is aware of its environment
THe Shifting the Burden archetype
If you have a headache and you take an aspirin and the headache goes away, then you might just be happy with that and not worry about why you had a headache in the first place. Next time you get a headache, you just take another aspirin, because it worked the first time. Pretty soon you will get used to it and always keep aspirin around and never look for a more fundamental solution to headaches. Taking aspirin will make it less and less likely that you adjust your health so that your body works right in the first place.
We often settle for symptomatic solutions. With all due consuquences…
Systems Thinkers discovered patterns of cause-effect relationships in organizations that are called archetypes. Shifting the Burden is one such archetype, and the headache story above is an example. Here’s how it works: We have a problem symptom. There is a fundamental solution to the problem, although it usually works at a delay. The fundamental solution gets overlooked often because of short-term thinking, pressure within the organization to come up with a quick fix, and a poor understanding of the relationship between cause and effect. Instead, we ‘shift the burden’ to other solutions, easy fixes that seem to work well. Unfortunately, we only deal with the symptom and not the underlying problem. Covered up by the symptomatic solution, the underlying problem grows worse unnoticed. We use more and more of the quick fix solution because that seemed to work, further reducing the pressure to seek a fundamental solution. Eventually the organization’s ability to solve the underlying problem gets undermined.
The more often you apply a quick fix, the less likely it is you will find a fundamental solution…
Another common example in my line of business is a manager that is trying to empower teams by delegation. But as the team struggles he steps in to help them, with all good intentions. Over time, this reduces the ability of the team to solve issues themselves. Instead, they increasingly get more dependent on the manager. The overprotective scrum master in the agile world is another well-known phenomenon in this category. Although often praised for the good relationship he or she has with the team and the great atmosphere in the team, the scrum master unintentionally has become the leader of the team, with everyone depending on him or her.
The causal loop diagram
The picture below is a causal loop diagram that explains the generic Shifting the Burden archetype. The diagram depicts the quick fix solution that temporally lowers the problem symptom, and the fundamental solution that would lower the symptom as well, although usually at a delay. There’s a side effect loop that shows we get more dependent on the quick fixes as we use them, undermining our ability to address the actual underlying problem.
Building high-performing teams
In a complex system however all parts of the system are interconnected and a change in one part can inadvertently lead to a problem elsewhere. We often find a series of interconnected shifting-the-burden structures where one fundamental solution is another problem’s symptomatic solution.
So how does the fundamental solutions become the symptomatic solution of another problem? While team cohesiveness grows a team identity gets developed. They slowly develop a ‘them-against-us’ mentality towards other teams or the surrounding organization. People outside of the team start perceiving the team as inward-thinking, taking care of only themselves, even if not in the interest of the larger organization. Conflict with the rest of the organization starts to grow.
The fundamental solution of building team coherence to the conflicts-within-the-team-problem has now become a symptomatic solution of a new problem: conflict between the team and its environment (causal loop B15). The team tries to deal with the new conflict by closing their ranks, sticking together, which in the ends only decreases their ability to fundamentally deal with the rest of the organization in a constructive manner.
So now we need to look at a fundamental solution to this problem, like helping the team to build a better understanding of the part they play in the larger organization (causal loop B16). You could encourage the team to explicitly define some of their team goals as contributions to higher organizational goals. This is actually a very powerful way to deal with the issues we inherit from today’s silo organizations: give teams or departments a goal they cannot achieve by themselves, but only by collaborating with others.
This practice is in contrast with the popular agile practice of giving teams their own domain to focus on. I strongly oppose to this. The logic behind it is to encourage teams to take ownership of their own area. But teams don’t work in isolation. They are part of a bigger whole, and this practice will unavoidably lead to local optimization and inward-focusing teams. Systems Thinking can help you understand and predict that.
When you coach a team it is easy to fall into the trap of local optima.
Conclusion
Note we covered only one Systems Thinking archetype in this article and only a fraction of the concepts behind Systems Thinking. Nevertheless, there are valuable lessons for agile coaches or anybody working on high-performing teams:
Always focus on the fundamental solution vs a symptomatic solution.
Withstand organizational pressure for quick solutions. There are no quick fixes to complex problems.
Note that a fundamental solution often needs to be discovered. Most times it is not a matter of analyzing, but of discovery through experiments.
Know that the more one applies a symptomatic solution the less one becomes able to come up with a fundamental solution.
Realize that a fundamental solution can at the same time be a symptomatic solution for another problem
Be aware of the trap of local optima.
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Bibliography
List of notes and sources we reference from.
Notes
- Martin Knapovsky. Shifting the burden archetype. https://www.knapovsky.com/shifting-the-burden-archetype/
- Daniel Kim. Shifting the burden revisited: Turtles all the way down. https://thesystemsthinker.com/shifting-the-burden-revisited-turtles-all-the-way-down/
