Systems

1 + 1 = 2. Or not.

"You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'”
(Sufi teaching story)

Do you know these people in relationships that are very different as a couple from how they are individually? You know Paul. And you know Paula. So, why the hell are they so weird when they are Paul and Paula?

Because the individuals Paul and Paula are very different from the system of Paul and Paula.

Have you ever tried the Thai dish Pad Thai? I love it. In fact, my girlfriend and I visited a Thai cooking school in Chiangmai, Thailand and learned how to cook it. Two very important ingredients of Pad Thai are oyster sauce and shrimp paste. They taste so awful you want to throw up if you taste them raw. But guess what - without them, a Pad Thai tastes like nothing.

Oyster sauce and shrimp paste are very different from the system of Pad Thai with oyster sauce and shrimp paste.

Loosely spoken, a system is the collection of individual "things" and what happens between these things. These things can be people, foods, cells in a body, features of a digital product, institutions in society, pixels on a screen, etc.

Systems are everywhere around us. We are part of thousands of systems within systems within systems... (relationships, social circles, families, schools, societies, the economy, the environment, social media, supermarkets, feature development teams, companies, FIFA20 online games, ...).

Now, the thing is that what we usually see are some (sometimes even all) parts of the system. Often, we also see the outcome of a system.

However, what often remains invisible to us is the interactions within that systems. There are feedback loops that can reinforce or decrease each other. Connections that can induce delayed effects. Interactions that amplify one characteristic or hide another. Synergies and competitions. And so on.

If we want to understand better why Paul and Paula are the way they are or become better at predicting the effects of our newly developed feature on our product experience - we need to become better systems thinkers:
Understanding not only the parts but also more of the interactions between the parts.

Systems make the world spin (literally).

To systems,
Phil