Why You Need Systems Thinking Now
"Focus on flows and relationships, not products or services." An argument for systems thinking instead of design thinking or breakthrough innovation.
[Tima Bansal and Julian Birkinshaw in Harvard Business Review]
The key thing I love about this is the focus on relationships rather than products and services. Those two things are relationships of a sort too, of course, but they’re not the only kinds of relationships involved in innovation, and it makes sense to think about them all holistically.
“An innovation need not be a new product, service, or feature to solve a problem. Changes to the flows or relationships among actors can be just as effective, either by reducing friction to speed things up or adding friction to slow down some parts of the system.”
I used to argue for a Sustainability lens, but that label suggests ethical risks. Those things are vitally important, but a true systems lens needs to additionally consider the health, experience, and effectiveness of the whole system beyond ethics and sustainability.
I actually don’t think that’s incompatible with design thinking. I also don’t think we can lose the focused lens on individual users, because there’s no sense in improving a system if the individual people in it won’t use your solutions — in software we always start with a 1:1 relationship with a user and work outwards. But there’s a lot to be gained by adding an additional focus on systems and giving it equal weight to our user focus.
What’s really nice about design thinking is that it offers very well-defined frameworks and activities to zero in on a user-centric solution. This article doesn’t concretely offer that for systems thinking; I’d love to think about how this applies in practice, and how you can effectively represent, consider, and test against systems as part of your development cycle.
[Link]
