Learning Systems Thinking

Chapter 3. Shifting Your Perspective

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Donald Berwick

Your perspective, or point of view, is the frame through which you observe the world. You might believe that your perspective is holistic, that you see everything you need to see. In fact, your perspective is a concept, a general notion of what’s happening. Creating conceptual integrity requires looking at circumstances through multiple perspectives, seeing it more broadly than our personal framing.

When you identify problems in a particular circumstance, you see them from your own unique experiences, expertise, attitudes, and biases. Someone else might see problems you don’t see or solutions you haven’t considered. We each take a snapshot that will be different from the snapshots other people will take of the same circumstances. These snapshots filter what we will think, see, focus on, and retain about any circumstance.

In the parable about the blindfolded people and the elephant, people experience one aspect of a whole and believe it represents the whole. We resemble this parable, like Figure 3-1, when faced with a system. We can understand part of it but need to synthesize other people’s perspectives in order to think about “the elephant” together.

Figure ...