Using System Archetypes for taking effective action

Organisations go through a lot of change and the predominant cause of these changes is growth. Every organisation would like to grow - though the dimension of growth would depend upon the purpose of that organisation.

One of my responsibilities as a Business Principal is to understand what growth brings to a specific organisation and how it can impact if the specific actions taken is not mapped in context for future.

I had an opportunity to facilitate an exercise for senior leaders in my organisation that had come together to make sense of an organisation-wide study of processes. There was a lot of chaos in the room since there was no one lens through which to view the findings of the study.

We used a simple system archetype called "Growth and Underinvestment". This post is a quick experience report on running the exercise for the team.

The Intent of the exercise

The team of senior leaders had been the recipient of the study report and had very little context to make sense of what the report meant or what should they take away from that report.

The intent of the exercise was for the team to understand and break through the results of the study report and relate to them better.

How we went about that

We started by forming teams of 3-5 people. 

We broke down the entire exercise into 5 questions. We had conversations as a team on these 5 questions. 

The conversations on these questions helped us understand what the study results meant. 

1) How are we doing today with demand and financial numbers?

This questions provided us with an understanding of how a behaviour reinforces another behaviour and creates a reinforcement loop. 

This information was not available with the study report and the team had to have conversations to come up with their perception of the state that the organisation is today.

2) What are our performance indicators? Account level, market level, positioning

This questions provided us with the first balancing loop. How does our growth lead to any of the basic performance parameters we are being judged on today. 

This helped the team members understand a little more on how growth is balanced by what we have today.

3) What are our standards – What do we not want to lose as we grow, our value proposition ?

This question provided us with an unique input - what drives our behaviour towards setting benchmark for any of the performance metric that the org is measuring itself.

4) Where are we investing , how soon how often?

This question provided us with the next part of the balancing loop. What is the org investing in today?

5) What is the result of these investments?

This question provided with the last part of the balancing loop. This helped the team realise that though we may be investing in the right areas, we are not seeing the results in time.

This discrepancy also affected our growth and hence that led to under-investment.

Next Steps

The team was able to come up with responses to the questions and in that process also make sense of a lot of the findings in the study. 

However, where the team struggled a lot was in terms of creating the loop and understanding that the delay in terms of investment kicking in. 

The team also struggled to understand the first balancing loop and how performance metrics in turn drive demand. 

What they appreciated the most in the exercise was the open conversations that the questions led to. 

Some learnings as a facilitator

• Have some prep time for the participants to understand the questions
• Walk through the system dynamic more to make use of it better
• Have a more detailed deep dive - probably for 2 hours rather than 45 minutes that we ended up doing.