Solution to help managers use their loaf

By SELWYN PARKER

Want to improve the quality of creative thinking in your company? Try getting your managers to write their resignations.

Worried about the effect on your company of a price war? Do a BOT (behaviour over time) analysis to see the full horror of the consequences. Customers complaining that deliveries are late? If you think it would help to promote deliveries to the angriest customers, think again.

The solutions to these and other everyday commercial problems lie in systems thinking, which could become the next big thing in management.

Dr Kambiz Maani, associate professor in the University of Auckland's department of management science and information systems, is flat out giving in-house courses on systems thinking to organisations such as KPMG, Unisys and Television New Zealand.

Dr Maani is the co-author of a book, Systems Thinking and Modelling, subtitled Understanding Change and Complexity, which explains in accessible language what it is about and how you can use it.

If you think your company may need fog lamps to see the way ahead, systems thinking should help.

"Systems thinking is a language to explain complexity," summarises Dr Maani. And, heaven knows, there is enough complexity around. It is already big in the United States. The clients of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the cradle of this particular set of management tools, include Harley Davidson, Hewlett Packard, Ford and EDS.

But back to managers writing out their resignations. When Royal Dutch Shell wanted creative management solutions, it set up a series of workshops. At the start, every attendee had to spend 20 minutes drafting his or her resignation. Apparently, there is nothing quite like this to stimulate productive reflection, even if it is an exercise.

As for the price war, the BOT exercise would probably paint such alarming long-term results including plunging profit margins that it would deter most companies from pursuing the cut-price route.

Finally, angry customers. The obvious solution will not work. Queue-jumping some customers over others is a "fix that fails," in systems thinking language, that will probably come back to haunt the company by creating a "reinforcing pattern" of production disruptions, further delivery delays, more customer dissatisfaction and other unwanted consequences.

Powerful as it is, systems thinking does not claim to have all the answers. After all, among other things it tries to predict the future consequences of a present action and nobody has yet found a method for saying what is going to happen tomorrow.

"We can't see the future," Dr Maani says. "But systems thinking is a tool that brings the future closer. It clears away the fog."

Systems thinking also goes deep to seek out underlying causes of certain phenomena. Very often, they are created by "solutions" in the past.

New Zealand's possum plague resulted from importing the pest for fur from Australia last century. And, suggests Dr Maani, the lowering of the legal drinking age last year has forced problem drinking down to even younger age groups.

A systems thinker probably would have picked all these up. Dr Maani is a true believer in its universality.

He has lectured politicians, informally advised rugby team managers, and even recommends it to families - "you can use systems thinking to talk to your teenagers."

This is not as silly as it may sound. American Jay Forrester runs a special unit at MIT where he talks to schools. So far, he has convinced 500 schools in America to apply systems thinking.

But do not think systems thinking is a new fad. It emerged in the 1920s from the growing recognition that Newtonian, linear thinking cannot cope with the interdependence, complexities and ambiguities of many chronic, contemporary problems - for example, in the interrelationships between cause and effect. Systems thinking seeks to provide a set of tools to solve them.Nor is systems thinking today's fad.

Having emerged in the 1920s from the growing recognition that Newtonian, linear thinking cannot cope with the interdependence, complexities and ambiguities of many chronic, contemporary problems - for example, in the interrelationships between cause and effect - systems thinking seeks to provide a set of tools to solve them.

ake the weather. The discipline is based on the view that contemporary issues resemble storms in which inter-reacting phenomenons collide: As Peter Senge explains: "A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain.

"We also know that after the storm, the run-off will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern."

The interrelationship of such phenomenons is obvious, at least to Augie Auer and Jim Hickey. But do managers know this?

If Senge's storm isn't a metaphor for commercial life, then nothing is. But rather than throw up their hands in despair and flee to the chaos theory, managers might find solace in the disciplines of systems thinking.

"We need new ways of thinking," argues Dr Maani.

* Systems Thinking and Modelling by Kambiz E Maani and Robert Y Cavana, published by Prentice Hall, is an important book for anybody trying to plot a course through the storms. It will not appeal to those who believe in off-the-shelf solutions.