Category: Articles
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Designing Effective Learning Environments
Imagine you are part of a healthcare team that has developed a computer model to grapple with the complex and often conflicting factors involved…
Leanness
Corporations today face many pressures to become “lean.” Unfortunately, most people also attach “mean” to lean, which can lead us to confuse leanness with…
What is Your Organization’s Core Theory of Success?
Managers in today’s organizations are continually confronted with new challenges and increased performance expectations. At the same time, they are bombarded by a bewildering…
Dancing with Systems
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are…
Acting and Thinking Systemically
In the summer of 2006, a group of local foundations supported the leaders of Calhoun County Michigan (population 100,000), in developing a 10-year plan…
Fine-Tuning Your Causal Loop Diagrams—Part I
Causal loop diagrams are an important tool for representing the feedback structure of systems. They are excellent for Quickly capturing your hypotheses about…
We Have to Talk: A Checklist for Difficult Conversations
Think of a conversation you’ve been putting off. Got it? Great. Then let’s go. There are dozens of books on the topic of difficult,…
Systems Archetypes As Structural Pattern Templates
Imagine you were suddenly struck with a strange illness that affected your vision. While you were still able to “see” everything around you, somehow…
Mental Models and Systems Thinking: Going Deeper into Systemic Issues
In a causal loop diagram of a systemic issue, variables are connected in cause-and-effect relationships. But often the implicit thought processes behind those links…
Selecting Variable Names for Causal Loop Diagrams
When first beginning to draw a causal loop diagram, don’t spend a lot of time up front trying to select the “perfect” variable name.