We’ve all noticed it in our colleagues: some people are really capable big-picture thinkers, and others have real mastery of the details, but either aren’t interested or aren’t able to connect those details to the larger purpose that those details serve. You might think of these two types of thinkers as specialists in either the macro or the micro, and every organization needs people who have a strong handle on that end of the scale. With the right guidance, those macro and micro thinkers can collaborate to do powerful things.
What kind of person do you have to be to make that collaboration possible? A macro thinker that gets the details? Some job descriptions call for the “detail-oriented” which, I’ve noticed isn’t so much about the details, as it is about which details. Details can be a rabbit-hole that once you start going down, there’s no limit to how deeply you can go, until it either brings productivity to a crawl or total paralysis trying to decide which details deserve your attention. It’s about understanding which details matter.
But there needs to be some bridge between the visionary macro thinker and the detail-oriented person who hammers out the high-quality deliverables. Someone who gets *how* those details serve the greater mission of the organization. Steve Jobs was one of those people who famously lived in both of those worlds, possibly at the expense of the mental health of both him and the people around him. I wondered if maybe there was a word for people who can fulfill that role.
So many people clamoring for attention start hurling hyperbole, but ironically end up diluting the power of those hyperboles. We know that words like genius, visionary, and pioneer grab our readers attention, and so we use them maybe a little too promiscuously for their own good. But how can we know? When is it fair to use these words? It’s a difficult question. I wanted a word that conveyed the skills, the ability to inhabit both the detailed and big picture worlds, and understand their interconnectedness, but without the baggage and glittering generality of those other more headline-leading words.
After spending some time with the Thesaurus, the Google machine, and reading several forum threads, I found that a lot of people are asking the same question: “what do you call someone who sees both details and the big picture?” And after a lot of false starts, I found a fair amount has been written about the term “systems thinker.” Intriguing.
Like so many concepts, someone saw this when the sophistication of human systems was just starting to ramp up in fledgling days of electronic computing. From Wikipedia:
Systems thinking has roots in a diverse range of sources from Jan Smuts‘ holism in the 1920s, to the general systems theory that was advanced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1940s and cybernetics advanced by Ross Ashby in the 1950s. The field was further developed by Jay Forrester and members of the Society for Organizational Learning at MIT which culminated in the popular book The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge which defined Systems thinking as the capstone for true organizational learning.
It goes on to define systems thinking:
Systems thinking has been defined as an approach to problem solving that attempts to balance holistic thinking and reductionistic thinking. By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.
It seems to me that as the world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, our kids need to be able to think about both the macro and micro as parts of an integrated system, and it turns out that a lot of educators agree. There’s been a big push for systems thinking in K-12 education. Which is good news for our kids. What’s even better news is that this means these are skills that can be learned. Cognitive skills are notoriously difficult to learn as we get older, but I believe that with practice, all things are possible.
Increasingly, the problems we are facing require a different approach. I’ll be writing in the future about each of the 14 Elements of Systems Thinking and the 10 Things Systems Thinkers Do, but for now, I’ve found this introductory video.