When faced with a problem, how often do teams within your organization become polarized around proposed solutions that are opposites? For example, one group…

System thinking tools, such as causal loop diagrams, foster high-quality thinking, communication, and decision-making in teams. But plunging into the realm of complex, dynamic…

Corporations today face many pressures to become “lean.” Unfortunately, most people also attach “mean” to lean, which can lead us to confuse leanness with…

The first thinking skill in the systems thinking paradigm is Dynamic Thinking. It comes first because you must be able to think dynamically in…

“What would be more interesting to you,” I ask an audience of executives, “engaging in a dialogue on learning how to coach or one…

Many of us are familiar with the following drill: Corporate pushes a new program, and each department must come up with its own plans…

The drive toward improvement has become a way of life in corporations today. Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and other improvement techniques have…

You have probably already learned about the importance of distinguishing among events, patterns, and structure. But still, you may be finding it difficult to…

We live in an era of massive institutional failure,” says Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International. We need only look around…

There are many possible starting points for drawing a systems diagram. One way to begin is by telling the story behind the problem, and…