Learning Systems Thinking

Chapter 4. Self-Awareness as a Foundational Skill

Self-awareness is a trait—or maybe “practice” is the more accurate way to put it—that everyone can always improve at. It is part emotional intelligence, part perceptiveness, part critical thinking. It means knowing your weaknesses, of course, but it also means knowing your strengths and what motivates you.

Neil Blumenthal, cofounder of Warby Parker, “Know Yourself”

You cannot improve your thinking if you aren’t aware of your thinking. The best way to begin practicing systems thinking is to practice with your most intimate system: yourself.

Systems thinking is grounded in metacognition: critical awareness of your own thought processes. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and evaluate situations. Your critical thinking skills depend on the quality and cohesiveness of your own thinking process. The way you objectively interpret thoughts, feelings, and experiences leads directly to your chosen courses of action. Your ability to reach sound conclusions via a path of observation, consideration, and inquiry is a strong measure of your systems thinking skills.

Note

The difference between having an opinion and reaching a conclusion is…when you reach a conclusion, you know how you got there. And you can map the journey for others.

Metacognition is the process of becoming self-aware. Self-awareness incorporates more than awareness of your thoughts. You are an embodied system of thoughts, cognitive patterns, feelings, physical sensations, core beliefs, mental structures, habitual behaviors, future expectations, and past experiences. You are a thinking system that exists inside of thinking systems that influence and shape your thinking.

Many of your thoughts arise as a result of systemic patterns that you’ve experienced. Self-awareness is noticing how you react to your experiences and understanding the way you learn best, how you change your mind. If you’ve participated in Retrospectives, the Agile rituals of evaluating experiences as a team, you have practiced a form of metacognition.

Without self-awareness, you can’t create conceptual integrity. If you pay careful attention, you’ll see that you are often being mentally dragged around by your unconsidered thoughts and reactions. You’ll notice when your thinking is reactive, fallacious, habituated, and lacking conceptual integrity.

Remember our simple system model (Figure 4-1)?

Figure 4-1. Donella Meadows’ system model

You consume information from external and internal sources. Your mind interprets that information and responds based on a myriad of factors—the environment, chemistry, genetics, upbringing, what you ate for breakfast, etc. You have goals, you identify discrepancies. Your thoughts generate your actions, and vice versa, in reinforcing feedback loops.

Your experiences are a feedback loop. For example, when your ideas are heard and helpful, your confidence increases, and you share more ideas. When your ideas are ignored or dismissed, you are more likely to doubt your thinking and keep it to yourself. Self-awareness helps us discern which circumstances nourish our thinking and which inhibit it.

Without self-awareness, you also can’t overcome counterintuitiveness, the habituated solutions that feel “right” to you. Counterintuitiveness, if you remember from Chapter 2, is a common systems thinking experience.

The Iceberg Model (Chapter 3) reveals that systems thinking is working with mental models. Metacognition is the skill that enables us to see mental models. Our core mental models design our systems. Self-awareness helps you discover the mental models at the bottom of your own icebergs.

For some software professionals, Part II of this book will challenge your definition of “technology skills.” We have been taught to focus on what we know, rather than how we think, feel, and learn. Knowledge work, we’ve been told, is the measure of our knowledge stock. How much do you know? A truer measure of knowledge work is the flow of knowledge. How much can you learn? The next three chapters help you improve your knowledge flow velocity by removing the common blockers that inhibit this flow. We begin with challenging our desire for concreteness and certainty.

Systems Thinking: The Hard Parts

An architect adds real value to an organization not by chasing silver bullet after silver bullet but rather by honing their skills at analyzing the trade-offs as they appear.

Neal Ford et al., Software Architecture: The Hard Parts (O’Reilly)

Systems thinking expands your capacity to do hard things. Perhaps you imagined that the “hard things” are developing asynchronous, event-driven software systems with increasing layers of abstraction orchestrated by infrastructure as code. Those are hard things! Harder still is developing the tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty that those systems require.

Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. When I take my thoughts at face value, I presume they are correct. When I look deeper, I see how interrelated my thoughts are with my point of view. From my point of view, I might be correct. When I consider a different point of view, I discover different, also correct, but sometimes opposing, ideas. The more relationally complex a system is, the more ambiguity there is—there is rarely one right point of view.

“Concrete” thinking seeks exact and singular interpretations, not ambiguity. Mindshifting, looking at multiple potentially correct ideas, teaches me that everything depends on everything else. There is not One Answer for me to discover. There are only tradeoffs, letting go of three good ideas in favor of one idea that better serves the circumstance. I might need to accept less of something desirable to get more of something valuable. For example, maybe the service I develop isn’t as fast as I’d hoped it would be, but it is reliable. I might determine that, in this case, reliability matters more.

Linear thinking processes are designed to construct certainty, to generate as much reliable exactitude as possible, especially when we are making decisions. The problem is, when it comes to systems, you cannot be certain…about anything. Every thought, every decision, is, to some extent, a guess. Everything is an experiment, a learning curve. In software systems, like in life, there is a Grand Canyon–sized gap between what we intend to happen and what actually happens. That’s not a bad thing—innovation is born in that gap.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, in part because we have greedy minds. Our minds want, and sometimes believe that we can accomplish, everything we imagine. Constraints, the limitations that all circumstances place on what’s possible, can seem unimportant or irrelevant and, especially, inconvenient.

When we accept that uncertainty is always part of the equation, we leave space for curiosity, learning, and observing what happens when we set our thoughts in motion. We make use of what we discover.

The more comfortable you are with the ambiguity and uncertainty in your own mind, the more comfortable you will be when immersing yourself in complex situations.

In systems thinking, your mind is your instrument. Your ability to hear your own mental music is critical to the work. When you practice thinking, you are also listening to thinking. Mastering your own mind is harder than any cloud architecture you will ever encounter.

Decision Making Is a Noisy Process

We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work (HarperOne)

As you strengthen your metacognition, you’ll discover that you are not as “in control” of your thinking as you might imagine. Sometimes, your true goals operate under the radar of your conscious awareness.

For example, when I’m faced with a tricky coding problem that I don’t know how to solve, I might think, “I’m hungry. I need to go to the grocery store.” Perhaps I am hungry and need food. My goal, on the surface, is to solve my coding problem by helping my brain think better.

Self-awareness has taught me to be wary. My true goal might be (and often is) avoiding the discomfort and uncertainty of facing the problem. My secondary goal is to ease that discomfort with a dopamine rush generated by the chocolate I’ll get at the grocery store. The goal of solving the tricky problem is a distant third. Without awareness of my own thinking patterns, I get carried away from what matters.

Conversely, when I am solving a tricky problem, I sometimes ignore hunger. For hours, I tweak and test and Google and fret. No joy.

In desperation, I get up and make a snack. Walk the dogs. Toss a load of laundry in the washing machine. Then sit back down at my desk…and immediately see the solution. In those situations, the thought “I’m hungry, I should go get food” would have been helpful.

Your mind supplies an endless flow of information in the form of ideas. And you are endlessly consuming more ideas and information. All that information flowing through your mind can seem equally important, equally worthy of your attention. Some thoughts, triggered by anxiety, will shout, like “I can’t get this done by tomorrow!” Some thoughts, triggered by insight, will whisper “pause and have a snack.” You know from experience that the louder thoughts are not necessarily the more helpful thoughts.

We call discerning which thoughts to prioritize distinguishing signal versus noise. Noise describes all the information that, despite its seeming importance or “shoutiness,” distracts you from what actually matters. Signal is an idea, information, insight, or concept that points your attention in a matterful direction.

Systems thinking is not simply generating new thoughts, or even different thoughts. It is, more often, discerning signal from noise. Noise makes your mind spin in circles, chasing its own tail. Signal is a path through mental clutter, a pointer toward meaningful change, even though you can’t be sure you’re going in the “right” direction.

If ambiguity and uncertainty are the hard parts, the tall buildings we must leap, discernment is the super power that enables us to leap them. Discernment is the ability to understand situations and make decisions, even when there is no concrete or “right” answer. We do this by discerning signal from noise.

Discerning noise from signal is how we discover leverage points, the most valuable changes in systems. Your own mind is your sandbox, where you can practice discerning signal from noise.

I would love to give you a concrete example, “this is signal and this is noise.” Of course, it depends. What is noise in one circumstance is signal in another. The more complex a situation, the more discernment you’ll need to navigate it.

What I can describe is what I call the “Cupholder Dilemma.” When I begin architecting a technology system, I focus on the core capabilities. If I were designing a car, I’d be thinking about engine power and the context it serves. “Under what conditions will people drive this car? What does the car need to handle well?” Other capabilities come later.

When I meet with stakeholders, I want to talk about the engine design. Invariably, the stakeholders are more concerned with the cupholders. “Where will drivers put their coffee cups?” In technology cultures, we call this bikeshedding. People tend to focus on trivial matters (noise), which are easier to solve and likely at the top of the Iceberg Model, rather than focusing on more complex matters like patterns, structures, and mental models (signal). This would be like designing a co-working space and spending half of your time figuring out where the bike shed should go and what it should look like. It might be easier and more enjoyable to think about that than, say, the plumbing or electrical system, but it’d be a mistake to start there.

The stakeholders are right, though, in a way. Cupholders are not trivial. When driving day to day, most of us care more about cupholders and phone chargers than horsepower. Cupholders matter. From a systems perspective, the key is timing—knowing when to talk about the engine and when to talk about the cupholders.

In Chapter 2, I said that time is always a factor in systems. Alas, our brains’ translation of time is unreliable and complex. Our thoughts jump around in time, to a solution that worked in the past or a problem that might arise in the future. Sometimes, past experience and future strategy help us find signal. More often, time jumps derail and confuse us. Discernment involves not simply knowing what to think about but also when to think about it.

Difficulty with discernment is a systemic problem. People have goals operating under their own radar. So do organizations. Groups of people grab hold of ideas that make the situation worse and ignore helpful ideas. When problem solving, people are overly influenced by past experiences or future fears, but they don’t share those experiences or fears. Thinking together can be like wandering in a forest (or trying to figure out what an elephant is) with a blindfold on.

The more you understand these patterns in yourself, the easier it will be to navigate them with others. You’ll be less likely to follow the drum beat of noise.

I encourage you to model because modeling helps discernment. Visual thinking can help people discern where to focus attention. Opening a Miro board might help people envision where cupholder discussions fit in the overall system design. A group that models together regularly is, in my experience, better at discerning together as well—especially when resolving competing priorities.

There is no avoiding competing priorities. For example, I want short-term pleasure and longer-term health. When deciding whether or not to eat a brownie, my mind tries to prioritize both things, even though they naturally conflict. When faced with a backlog of things to build, I want to build them all, except the ones I don’t enjoy. When you pay attention to how you make decisions, you’ll see that your mind goes to great lengths to avoid making tradeoffs.

Our technology lives are full of brownies. Remember the carboat from Chapter 2? One team wants a car. Another team wants a boat. The engineers build a carboat, which nobody wants. Discernment is the skill involved when designing the system that people actually need.

Noisy, conflicting opinions about what is best to do can feel like walking down the middle of a road during a hurricane. We get blown around by every idea, veering off course and getting lost in the fog. Systemic forces push against some of our choices and encourage others, invoking feedback loops. This entire book is about working inside of those forces, but your ability to do so will be limited by your self-awareness.

We cannot control our thinking, or other people’s thinking, but fortunately, systems thinking is not about gaining more control…it is about making better choices. Finding leverage points, places where a change will have a big impact. Like Donella Meadows says, “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”

Learning this dance begins with becoming aware of how we arrive at conclusions. What information do we pull from the stream? What happens when you make choices? Do you feel confident, uncertain, overwhelmed? What drives you? Is it distraction, fear, logic, interest? You will likely discover that your own process mirrors many choice-making processes around you.

Watching your mind is like watching the weather. Chaos, the book by James Gleick, tells the story of how the science of systems thinking began…with a meteorologist literally studying weather patterns. He found patterns in the absence of patterns.

You’ll find patterns too, but only if you practice. You will not maintain physical strength while lying on the couch eating brownies and binging Netflix. The same goes for self-awareness—it is a strength developed by exercising it. That is why we need to continuously practice, paying attention to the thinking we consume and the thinking we produce.

Fortunately, the first step is no sweat. Begin by observing your thinking.

Observe Your Thinking

We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

There are fascinating books, courses, and other resources describing the neuroscience of self-awareness and metacognition. I don’t recommend that you start there. Don’t begin by thinking about how your mind should work, could work, might work. Instead, begin by looking at how your mind actually works. Become familiar with its patterns and processes. If you are like most people, you find getting swept up in interesting theories easy. Paying attention to your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences—that’s hard.

Nonlinear approaches always begin with observation—paying attention to how things work. When I begin learning about a new system, I begin by modeling the current software system, describing the flow of information and the stuck places. I listen to the frustrations people express because those frustrations point me to the stuck places, the leverage points. I ask, learn, see, understand.

Tip

I would not need to do this, to the extent I have, if there was already an insightful description and model of the system and how it serves its purpose. I have yet to engage with a software system that has this systemic view available to peruse. As part of your systems thinking practice, you might want to create one.

We continue to observe throughout the delivery process and the whole lifecycle of the system. Observation never ends. But as we do, we are still looking at what is present now. What is actually happening? How are the patterns reinforcing (or not) our goals? Continuous observation will show you what you need to learn before you act.

We don’t begin with trying to “fix” our thinking because if you try to fix something without awareness, you will make a mess. Perhaps you’ve experienced this in your professional life? The new boss who wants to transform the software without knowing anything about it? The new silver bullet, say Kubernetes or continuous deployment, that fixes some problems but creates more? Without awareness, your fixes are New Year’s resolutions that are abandoned before Groundhog Day.

Who is the “you” that wants to control your thinking or fix yourself? That part of your mind is extremely steeped in linear processes. Those are not the processes we want to strengthen. We want to strengthen our ability to notice, understand, listen, and see clearly. We want to spot patterns, blind spots, and habitual processes.

Without self-awareness, when we dance with systems, our unexamined thinking and emotional reactions will color, block, or reconstruct what we see and hear. We will jump on bandwagons that lead us nowhere. Our thinking impacts everything we build, every team we join, every meeting we are in, everyone who works with us. It is the stuff that knowledge work, and doing hard things together, is made of.

Your Practice: Flow with Your Thinking

I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing toward being a champion.

Billie Jean King, one of the greatest tennis players of all time

Cal Newport, bestselling author and CompSci professor at Georgetown, argues that daily solitude is essential for knowledge workers. He defines solitude as “isolated from input from other minds.” I’d add that we don’t just need to be isolated from input, we also need to train ourselves to pay attention to our thinking.

There are many ways to do this, but one practice has been, by far, the most valuable to my work. You might love it and, like me, do it every day for the rest of your life. You might discover it’s not for you and try something else. I encourage you, though, to try it. See what happens. Let the experience reveal (or not) its value.

The practice is: just write.

For one week, wake up every morning, pick up a pen and paper, set a timer for 10–20 minutes, and write whatever comes to mind.

Now, maybe you’re thinking, “No way, Diana, that is never happening.” Cool, you can skip this and still practice systems thinking. Or you can try writing at a different time of day. Mornings really are ideal for thinking…but here’s an alternative….

For one week, every day after a meeting or focused work session, pick up a pen and paper, set a timer for 10–20 minutes, and write whatever comes to mind.

Write whatever comes to mind. If you get stuck, write “I don’t know what to write” until more thoughts come to you. If you think “this is a dumb exercise,” list all the ways it’s a dumb exercise. The only rule is: keep your hand moving.

Sounds simple, yes? Perhaps, but you will come up with 17,659 reasons not to do this practice. If you can’t do 20 minutes, do 10. If you can’t do 10, do 5. Notice, and write about, all the things you think you should be doing instead. Why you hate it, why you resist it. Or why you love and need it and find the practice worthwhile.

There are great journal apps available that include daily prompts. If you feel stuck, try one of those. Or write down a thought that occurred to you during the day and explore it during your session.

Write notes to your cat. It doesn’t matter what you write about, only that you create space to observe your thinking. Of course, you can write about systems! I encourage that—practice using the Iceberg Model. But don’t worry if your brain wanders into “what will I have for lunch” territory; you’re learning about your thinking system.

When the week is up, if you see a benefit, commit to 30 days.

Here’s an example of a situation where my free writing practice had a major career impact.

At one organization, I was buried under a pile of chaos: leadership changes, circuitous and endless disagreements, maddening and unworkable “new” strategies, derisive words being said in meetings…it was a mess.

There were also good strategies, helpful supportive colleagues, and matterful work to be done. I could no longer tell the difference between what mattered to do and what was a waste of energy. Thoughts, opinions, and emotional reactions (like feeling powerless) were tumbling around in my mind. I felt paralyzed and powerless.

During my morning writing practice, a question occurred to me. “What if I were in charge?” What if I were the incoming CTO, someone who could say or do whatever was strategically sensical? I wrote out exactly what I would do, including what I would say to the people when I made the changes.

In other words, I listened to myself.

Through this exercise, I discovered a path to insight. I didn’t show anyone what I wrote; I didn’t need to—I knew what to do. Eventually, I moved on from that organization, but not as a blameful reaction, as a solid choice to navigate in a different direction.

Alternative Practices

A morning writing practice is helpful for many people. Are you one of them? I’ve been teaching workshops, using writing as a thinking practice, and attendees have found this practice surprisingly beneficial.

If you want to try something else or you’d like more than one practice, here are more recommendations.

Walking

This is the practice Cal Newport, like many before him, has adopted and recommends. Want to ponder? Take a walk.

Rhythmic movement

Running, yoga, hiking, dance, rowing, or cycling are examples of meditation in motion. As you engage in them, notice when your thinking drags you elsewhere and return your attention to your physical experience.

Meditation

You can practice meditation while sitting still, moving, doing breathing exercises, listening to music, drumming, chanting, following words spoken by a guide, or some combination of these.

Discourse

Talking to trusted people about your experiences helps you become more aware of your experiences. Discussion can be used as a deep self-awareness practice.

Making art

When we get immersed in a creative process, we are usually, also, listening closely to ourselves. We practice both acting on our impulses and deciding when not to act on them. When art is used as a self-awareness practice (rather than strictly a crafting exercise), it can be a powerful tool. We can make models and code as we would make art.

There is no right way to cultivate self-awareness. Trust yourself to discover the ones that work for you. There are many teachers whose purpose is to support self-awareness practices; you might find that having one helps you.

When done with the right mindset, reading can be a foundational and valuable practice for understanding your own thinking. When Joseph Campbell, who co-wrote The Power of Myth (Doubleday), was asked what form of meditation he practiced, he said “I underline sentences.”

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday (Delacorte Press)

The practice that you choose is not what matters most. What matters most is that you show up for it.

MAGO: Everything Is in Our Blind Spots

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

Even in the increasingly interconnected world of today, we all live in binary mental models. Manager/contributor. Architect/engineer. Frontend/backend. Product/tech. OO/functional. Systems thinking, however, is nonbinary. Exploring nuance, all the subtleties that happen between, beneath, and around our binary views, is how we understand a system. We will reinforce those constructed dualities and limited worldviews unless we proactively practice seeing beyond them. It’s easier to get stuck between two opposing views than it is to explore the nuanced, often unconscious biases that narrow our vision.

We all have blind spots, realities we don’t perceive because we are limited by our current mental models, structures, and experiences. This is not a problem. Even if it was a problem, we can’t fix it. We can’t know everything about everything, and our concepts are constructed by the world around us. To some extent, we see what we’ve been shown.

We get stuck when we forget that everything we’ve been conditioned to think may not be true. In any given moment, our fundamental mental models are flawed, not because they are a lie but because they are limiting. Insufficient. Ideas that were correct (enough) in one context are not correct in another. Nevertheless, we try to apply them.

Paradigms shift. The rules we followed, the structures we built, the patterns we learned to trust through hard times…become our limitations. Growth is evolving as paradigms shift. We struggle with this. And so do organizations.

MAGO’s system developed over decades. The roles people play, the way they do their work, the software systems they rely on—all arose to serve their evolving needs. Remember from Part I of this book that MAGO’s thinking and communication structures have led them to a crisis: they’re in a quandary; their current software system is inadequate for the contemporary media landscape, but fixing it seems impossibly disruptive. They will benefit from becoming aware of those structures.

Simultaneously, the paradigm has shifted around MAGO, and still is shifting. Their system is being shaped by pressures from the outside, as well. The world of print magazines and static content and subscription websites is fading. The world of digital information systems is arising. What will help MAGO see the world they don’t yet see?

Five activities can help people at MAGO to become aware of their own thinking patterns and proactively seek out what they don’t know they don’t know.

Model the Current System

The people at MAGO understand the system from their point of view. But they probably don’t understand how the parts work together. They probably also don’t understand how their work impacts other people’s work. By modeling how the current system works, not just the tech but also the people processes, MAGO can uncover blind spots in their thinking about their system.

Research Similar Systems

Chances are, MAGO is trying to solve the same problem as other organizations. There are three benefits to researching how other similar systems work:

1. Uncover the landmines.

The wicked problems that nobody knows how to solve yet might not be worth investing in. MAGO can adapt their strategy to avoid those problems, if they know what they are.

2. Highlight the opportunities.

MAGO is held back by its current system. As a result, they might not have envisioned strategic opportunities that would be relatively easy to accomplish. Other organizations might be seeing these benefits already.

3. Define technological constraints.

Most organizations, including MAGO, dream of doing things that our current technology tools can’t yet do. Systems that share MAGO’s purpose will have qualities and constraints in common. By understanding the technological landscape, MAGO can decide where to invest in innovation and where to accept the tradeoffs that come with their software options.

Listen to the Pain

As a systems architect, one of the most impactful things I do is watch people use the system. I’m astounded by how differently people experience software. The experience is impactful because it helps me discern what matters. What works now? Why does it work? What sucks now? Why does it suck? Listening to engineers and product people answer these questions is the quickest way to uncover leverage points in a system. And, of course, listening to feedback from customers is crucial.

MAGO is solving a problem—do they understand what their problem really is? Will their “replace the software” solution solve their pain points?

Make Some Prototypes

When we face the unknown, we are full of doubt. Thinking doesn’t relieve our doubt. Experience does. Before MAGO takes a leap of faith, they could experiment. If MAGO was brand new, today, how would we design the system? How would we organize the people? What tools would we try first? Choose a capability that could be built in the “brand new MAGO” way and give it a try. You are guaranteed to discover at least one unknown in the process.

What If We Do Nothing?

Proactively seeking out what you don’t know you don’t know sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? How does MAGO know what MAGO doesn’t know? One way to uncover blind spots is to ask, “What if we do nothing?” Stay with the line of thinking, even if it gets weird. The things organizations most fear are not usually the things that they should fear. (Just like people.) Explore the pathway of “we take no action” and the pathway of “we take one action like replacing the software” and follow it to the end. What does this reveal?

MAGO faces the same challenges we all face: how to adapt to changing circumstances. There are a myriad of ways to develop awareness and discover blind spots. In systems, most solutions will be waiting for us there.

Support for Your Practice: 12 Things Self-Awareness Taught Me

To encourage your practice, here are 12 insights that self-awareness practices have revealed to me over the years. Perhaps you’ll make a list of your own, to help encourage your practices?

• The quality of my deliverables is equivalent to how well I can discern between good thinking and habituated thinking.

• The level of psychological safety in my environment is directly correlated to the quality of work I can deliver.

• I overcomplicate things until I can see the elegant simplicity.

• Fighting other people’s thinking is usually a waste of energy. Demonstrating sound thinking more often gets me what I need.

• The mental models that shape how I think are often contradictory and sometimes nonsensical. Discerning which models to rely on and which to discard is challenging.

• My thoughts are not always truthful, reasonable, intelligent, or have my best interest at heart.

• My first instinct about whether or not to trust my own thinking, before objectively considering it, is unreliable.

• The quality of my thinking improves when I’m focused. It degrades when I get busy.

• Complexity is a nourishing pool that I can dive into. Generally, I’ve preferred to stand on the edge and shout at it.

• I am more swayed by other people’s opinions, and more often, than I want to admit.

• I often make bad decisions when my emotions are leading the way. I make even worse decisions when my emotions are ignored.

• What I perceive as my own needs are often manufactured needs. For example, “relaxing” activities, like binge-watching Netflix, aren’t necessarily relaxing. The streaming media experience is designed to create a “need” for more.

Understanding my own mental and emotional patterns has made me a more nuanced systems designer. When I’m caught up in the noise, I recognize that sooner. I’ve been burned out and angry after investing myself in a situation that didn’t change. I wasn’t wrong, but my frustration, blame, and negative reactions eclipsed new thinking. Through self-awareness, I slowly but surely have learned (and am still learning) to be the change I want to see in the world.