Systems Thinking Chapter 12: Redefining Success - Part 2

This is Part 2 of 2 for Chapter 12. If you missed Part 1, go read it first. We covered how success is a system, enabling constraints, root causes, equalizing impact, knowledge flow, and the paradigm shift. Now we finish the chapter and the book.

Qualities of Success

Diana does something unusual here. After eleven and a half chapters of no checklists, no templates, no step-by-step guides, she finally gives us one. A checklist. At the very end. And it is a good one.

This is a list of qualities you can use to measure whether your systems thinking practice is actually working. Not metrics in the traditional sense. More like signs that you are on the right track.

Here are the highlights, in my own words.

You practice thinking. Not just doing. You and your team make thinking part of daily life. Writing, modeling, crafting artifacts, coding, improving feedback skills. And you talk about these things as real technology skills. Not “soft skills” that somehow don’t count.

You can explain the difference between linear and nonlinear thinking. You know when to use analytical, reductionistic thinking and when to take a systemic perspective. Sometimes you need both. The point is you can tell the difference.

You see challenges as sociotechnical. People systems and technical systems are not separate. They never were. When you recommend a technical solution, you also describe what it means for people.

You developed your own understanding of conceptual integrity. Not from a textbook definition. Your own. And you can explain it to others.

Because you know systems are counterintuitive, you actively look for ways you might be making a problem worse. This is hard. Nobody likes to admit they are part of the problem. But you do it anyway. And when you face pushback, you still describe the negative impacts and recommend improvements.

When problems keep coming back, you look at systemic structures and feedback loops. You know that blame is a distraction. Blaming leadership, blaming product, blaming the other team. None of that points you in the right direction. You also resist the temptation to solve complex problems with a single tool. Kubernetes is not a magic bullet. Neither is any other technology.

You shift perspectives easily. You include people who disagree with you. You include nontechnologists. You synthesize other people’s knowledge instead of just pushing your own.

You demonstrate self-awareness. When you catch yourself reacting, you pause. You know your own reactive patterns.

You make systemic reasoning the default communication style. You create well-reasoned ideas and articulate the reasoning behind them. You help others strengthen their reasoning instead of just giving them your opinion.

There are more items on the list, but you get the idea. It is less about what tools you use and more about how you think and work with others.

Success for MAGO

MAGO is the fictional media organization Diana uses throughout the book. In this section, she looks at what success would actually mean for them.

Their core purpose has not changed. Publish information products that people pay to consume. Simple, right? But every single word in that purpose has shifted meaning.

“Publish” used to mean print media migrated to digital. Now it means distributing content to a wide variety of platforms, running 24/7.

“Information” used to be a page, an article, an image. A CRUD object. Now it is data in motion. An article is a group of characters that gets restructured depending on what platform consumes it. Desktop shows one thing. Mobile shows another. Social media grabs the summary. Siri reads one sentence. An LLM consumes something else entirely.

“Products” used to mean a magazine article or a book. Now a product can be anything. A YouTube channel, a paid newsletter, an SMS headline stream, a film. All from the same information source.

“People” used to mean subscribers with measurable preferences. Now it means everyone, everywhere. Communicating with someone browsing magazines at the airport is very different from communicating with someone browsing the internet on their phone.

“Pay” is the big question mark. Is Kobo the new bookstore? Is Netflix the new movie theater? Is ad revenue still worth pursuing? There is a lot of free information now. What makes information worth paying for?

Diana makes a powerful point. MAGO’s sociotechnical system no longer fits the world around them. They duct-taped things together, but that is not success. Success for MAGO is changing the system’s goal itself. Not patching old software. Not adding new CRUD applications. Redesigning the system.

Objectives for Systems Leaders

Diana gives practical objectives for someone starting out as a systems leader. Three big areas.

Cultivate conceptual integrity in solution recommendations. When your team recommends something, they should explain why it serves the system’s purpose. They should show multiple perspectives, including ones that disagree. They should describe other options they considered and why this one is better. They should model system patterns. They should improve people processes and understand how to reinforce changes in thinking and behavior.

Improve knowledge stock. When someone shares an idea, they also share the reasons behind it. Before responding to others, team members acknowledge what they heard first. They create artifacts collaboratively. When they need expertise from outside the team, they partner with others to think about the problem together.

Improve knowledge flow. Create consistent experiences for teams to learn together. Leverage the skills and judgment of team members for hard challenges. Build relationships among models and artifacts. Approach technology development as a sociotechnical system that adapts. Reinforce good behavior through feedback loops. Discourage bad behavior through better structures.

Diana sums it up beautifully. If she had to capture the practices of a software professional who is a systems leader, it would be this: learn more, dictate less. Respect your teammates and your own integrity.

Dancing with Systems

The book ends here. Diana says she hopes you found value. Her fondest wish is that you enjoy knowledge work more. And that you know you are not alone, even when you feel like you are.

Her goal has been improving our ability to do hard things together. She hopes you will come to love dancing with systems, just like she does.

She closes with Donella Meadows: “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”

That is the whole book in one line. You will never fully understand a complex system. You will never control it. But you can learn to move with it, respond to it, adapt, and make it better.

After 12 chapters, I think the biggest takeaway is this. Systems thinking is not a methodology. It is not a framework you install. It is a practice. Like yoga or playing guitar. You get better at it over time. Some days are better than others. But if you keep practicing, you start seeing things differently. You stop blaming and start understanding. You stop reacting and start responding. And that makes all the difference.

Thanks for reading this whole retelling series. I hope it was useful.

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