An introduction to systems thinking for parents and team leaders, drawing on Senge, Meadows and Bowen, with practical ways to break recurring patterns.
Every family and every team has a problem that keeps coming back. The argument about chores that returns every few weeks. The project that always runs late at the same stage. The colleague who is replaced and whose replacement develops the same habits within months. We tend to treat each return as a fresh failure, usually someone’s fault. Systems thinking offers a different way to look at it.
The basic idea is simple. A system is a set of parts connected in a way that produces a pattern over time. A family is a system. So is a team of five in a shared office. The pattern that keeps returning is often being produced by the connections between people, and fixing one person at a time rarely changes it.
Structure shapes behaviour
Peter Senge brought this thinking to a wide audience in The Fifth Discipline. One of his best known illustrations is the beer distribution game, a simulation developed at MIT. Players act as a retailer, a wholesaler, a distributor and a brewery. A single modest change in customer demand ripples up the chain. Because orders take time to arrive and nobody can see the whole picture, players over order, run out, over order again, and end up with huge surpluses. At the end, almost everyone blames the other players.
Senge’s point was that the result hardly depends on who plays. Experienced managers and students produce the same swings, because the delays and blind spots built into the game drive their decisions. The structure produces the behaviour.
Take for instance, a small accountancy practice in Leeds that went through three office managers in two years. Each was capable at the interview and overwhelmed within six months. The partners put it down to poor hiring. When they finally mapped the role, they found that the office manager was the only person who knew the password to the client portal, the only person who could authorise supplier payments, and the person every partner called when anything went wrong at home or at work. Nobody could have done that job well. The practice split the role, shared the passwords and the payment authority, and the fourth office manager is still there.
Loops that feed themselves
One of the most helpful ideas in systems thinking is the feedback loop. A reinforcing loop is a cycle that grows stronger each time it goes round. A balancing loop pulls things back towards a set point.
Families are full of reinforcing loops. A parent in Lagos notices her teenage son spending hours on his phone and starts reminding him to put it down. He feels watched and spends more time in his room, on the phone. She sees less of him and reminds him more. He withdraws further. Each person is reacting reasonably to the other, and together they are driving the pattern harder.
Teams have them too. A manager in Port Harcourt worries about quality and checks her team’s work closely. The team, knowing everything will be checked, takes less care. Quality drops. She checks more closely still.
Seeing the loop is often the turning point, because it shows that the way out is to change one link in the chain rather than to push harder on the same one. The Lagos mother stopped commenting on the phone and started inviting her son to cook with her on Saturday mornings. Once he was spending time with her, the phone mattered less, and the reminders were no longer needed.
Where to intervene
Donella Meadows, a systems scientist, wrote a short and influential piece about the places where a change in a system has the most effect, later expanded in Thinking in systems. Her conclusion surprised some readers. The changes people reach for first, such as adjusting a number, a target or a budget, tend to have the least effect. Changes to the flow of information, to the rules, and above all to the goals and shared beliefs of the system have far more.
In a family, adjusting a number might mean raising a child’s pocket money or extending a curfew by thirty minutes. Changing the information flow might mean the child finally hears why the curfew exists. Changing the goal might mean the family agreeing that the purpose of the rules is to help the child become someone who can manage their own time, rather than to keep the parents calm. That last shift changes almost every conversation that follows.
Triangles and the third person
Murray Bowen, whose work on family systems is set out with Michael Kerr in Family evaluation, noticed that when tension between two people rises, one of them will often pull in a third person to ease the discomfort. A mother complains to her daughter about her husband. A team member complains to a colleague about the manager. The tension drops for a while, which is why the pattern repeats, but the original relationship is left untouched.
Triangles explain a lot of recurring trouble in small teams and families. The same argument keeps returning because it is never had between the two people it belongs to. The third person, often kind and well meaning, becomes part of what keeps it going.
Practical steps for this week
If there is a problem that keeps returning in your family or team, try working through these questions with the people involved, ideally with a large sheet of paper on the table.
Describe the pattern over time rather than the latest incident. When did it start? How often does it return? What usually happens just before it?
Draw the loop. What does each person do in response to the others, and how does that response feed the next round?
Look for delays and blind spots. Who does not have the information they would need to act differently?
Look for triangles. Is anyone carrying messages or tension that belongs to a relationship between two other people?
Choose one place to change the structure, rather than one person to change. Make it small enough to try this week.
I am running a short systems thinking course this month for parents and team leaders who want to work through their own recurring patterns with others doing the same. You can find the details and register at www.deleagbogun.com.
The same problem coming back is frustrating. It is also information. It tells you that something in the way your family or team is arranged is producing that result, and that is something you can change together.
Why the same problems keep returning: systems thinking for families and small teams
