Systems Thinking for Business Leaders
A Two-Day Seminar
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$100 Discount for BetterManagement.com Members |
Too often business leaders find themselves playing management roulette: evaluating organization, technology or process changes without having great confidence that promised results can be achieved. Why do so many well-conceived programs fall short? Why do better improvement opportunities go unseen? Systems Thinking provides the answers.
- Map your company’s business system
- Determine the complex root causes of business challenges
- Discover which challenges cannot be resolved by process and technology changes alone
- Evaluate the impact of proposed improvement solutions
- Develop more effective organizational improvements
- Discover the “hidden” causes of organizational resistance to change
- Provide better direction and metrics for process redesign initiatives
You Will Learn How To... Seminar Outline
Systems Thinking: The Key to Making Better Business Decisions
Imagine trying to move one strand in a spider’s web. It’s impossible to do so without impacting the entire structure.
Your company is like that web. It is comprised of a business system that is much more complex than simple organization charts and process maps reveal. That’s why the true impact of tactical solutions like process reengineering, technology upgrades or policy changes is so hard to predict.
Peter Senge calls systems thinking “a discipline for seeing wholes.” Its techniques were developed to understand how complex interactions in nature cause the outcomes we observe in the world around us. These same tools can be adapted and applied to your unique business model to help your leaders make better business decisions.
The solutions to your organization’s most complex challenges cannot be one-dimensional. Simple solutions, while elegant, often fail to address key factors that later undermine business results. Systems analysis techniques are a natural extension of the process management techniques your leaders currently utilize. However systems thinking tools give you a greater understanding of the cause-and-effect cycles that:
1) Reveal the true root causes of problems
2) Foretell the real, big picture impact of tactical alternatives.
At Systems Thinking for Business Leaders, you will learn how to:
- Map key business systems
- Evaluate data from feedback and feed forward loops
- Determine if business challenges require process design or process deployment changes
- Define a desired future state for your business system
- Evaluate the cause and effect relationships of potential change strategies
- Charter appropriate process, technology and policy improvement initiatives
Armed with the tools and knowledge to manage your business systemically, you will be able to evaluate current organizational performance, design a desired future state, enact systemic changes that have enduring impact and face ongoing business challenges more effectively.
Seminar Outline
Complexity and Simple Solutions
Structure and behavior of dynamic systems
Organizational components and behaviors that create complexity in businesses
Solving problems in a complex environment
Understanding systemic constraints
Differentiating between the fire and the fuel
How to find root causes of business problems
Seeing The Big Picture
Moving from a tactical to systems approach
The Causal Loop Diagram
Identifying systemic problems
The System Map
Feedback and feed-forward loops
Measuring performance gaps
Identifying the need for process redesign vs. redeployment
Defining the "To Be" Business System
Tools for modeling dynamic business systems
- understanding common design flaws
The State Change chart
Understanding the changes required to achieve "To Be" performance
Alternative system models and archetypes
System Solutions
Creating strategic solutions
Chartering improvement activities
Integrating a systems management approach
You Will Learn How To:
- Effectively respond to the increasing pace of change that affects your business.
- Use a systems thinking approach to manage in a complex business environment.
- Discover the root causes of persistent business challenges.
- Identify systemic constraints to business growth and efficiency.
- Use system maps to define value chains and the relationships that influence them.
- Evaluate how feedback and feed-forward communication are affecting process expectations and customer-supplier relations.
- Determine if problems can be resolved through better process execution or if fundamental changes are required.
- Use causal loops to explore the consequences (intended and unintended) of current practices and proposed solutions.
- Use state change charts to evaluate and define changes to your business system.
- Recognize tactics (process, technology or policy changes) that will not deliver anticipated benefits to your enterprise, even if implemented successfully.
- Achieve sustainable high performance by establishing a more reliable business system.
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