Closed-loop thinking
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Ask this question to a systems thinker and two things will happen:
1. You will never get a straight answer.
2. They will take you round in circles, along the lines of ‘the more chickens you have, the more eggs you have, and the more eggs you have, the more chickens you have’. They might also go on about how long it takes for an egg to become a chicken and other things that can affect that process.
Thinking in circles
Systems thinkers like to think in circles, or to describe it more accurately, to think in closed loops. The closed loops indicate feedback in a system, whereby actions affect outcomes and the outcomes, in turn, influence those actions. This feedback continues in cycles unless something interrupts it.
You can find examples of such feedback cycles everywhere. Here are a few:
You feel tired so you drink coffee, coffee keeps you going so you don’t take time to rest. As a result, you feel even more tired, and you need even more coffee. The more coffee you drink, the less you rest, the more tired and reliant on coffee you become.
A company that releases a successful product and makes good profit will have more money to invest in making other products, and generating even more profits that can be further invested in more or better products. As the company continues to create successful products, its reputation gets better, encouraging more people to buy its products, and further increasing profits.
Climate change is causing unbearable heat in many countries, leading people to invest in stronger air conditioning units, which consume more fossil-fuel-generated energy, increasing CO2 emissions and exacerbating global warming, which leads to more reliance on air conditioning.
Increased rates of crime in the UK meant more people were put in jail. As more people were put in jail, jails became more and more crowded. As the jails became more crowded, the inmates’ living conditions deteriorated, leading to strain and health issues, and more violence. More violence meant longer jail sentences, more overcrowding, worse conditions, and more violence.
These examples are simplistic, and of course, you know that.
But how often do you think this way?
Since you are reading this, you probably enjoy thinking deeply about things and might already think in closed loops a lot of the time. But most people are conditioned to think in terms of linear, one-way explanations, where one cause has one effect:
I’m tired so I drink coffee and I will feel less tired.
Business as usual will continuously produce the same results.
If we cut down the use of fossil fuels, the climate problem will disappear.
Jails are overcrowded so we release some of the prisoners early to improve conditions in jail.
In his presentation, A Banquet of Consequences: Systems Thinking and Modelling for Climate Policy, John Sterman, MIT professor of systems dynamics states that one of the biggest hurdles for action towards solving climate change is the inability of climate policymakers and negotiators to think in terms of feedback.
Shifting from open-loop to closed-loop thinking is a game changer, but one that many people struggle with, not because it is particularly difficult, but because it involves breaking usual habits of thinking, and adopting new ones.
A new thinking habit
So how do you build this habit? How do you train your brain to move beyond the straight lines, from A causes B, to A causes B, which then influences A, creating a never-ending loop?
My proposed answer is that you start with a simple and small activity, you turn that into a habit, and you let it expand and evolve into a fully-fledged capability. Here are three steps to start with:
1. Pay attention to feedback.
Look for examples of feedback in everyday life: relationships, work, shopping, transport, etc.
I find politicians a good source of examples of linear, open-loop thinking. Pay attention to the decisions they make and ask the question: How will this decision come back to bite them in the backside? What will be the feedback generated by this decision/action? e.g. How will releasing prisoners earlier from jail lead to more crime in society, and subsequently to a need for more jails?
2. Draw one simple loop a day.
It helps to visualise feedback loops. The key to making closed-loop thinking effortless is to start small, very small.
Draw one loop a day until that becomes second nature. It’s very tempting to start drawing plates of spaghetti (aka causal loop diagrams), but those are pointless if you are still thinking in a linear way.
I like to use pen and paper, but if you really want to use your computer, Loopy is the easiest tool to start with.
Here is a loop that my six-year-old daughter drew on Loopy. She wanted to represent that she feels happy when she sings, and when she is happy, she wants to sing to express her happiness, and so it goes on and on (and on and on and then some more…).
This is what I mean by very simple. If you are just starting out, start with loops this simple. Gradually, you will start to see them everywhere and start to see more complex connections.
3. Look for knock-on effects.
Ask: And then what? What else happens as a consequence of that action? This moves you from thinking in terms of
‘one action = one consequence’, to ‘one action = multiple consequences’.
Going back to our jail example, we could think about how released inmates are integrated back into society. What resources will be needed? Where will these resources come from, and what other activities would be impacted by the reshuffling of resources? How would we ensure that they do not pose a threat to society?
We could also consider if certain communities would develop a reputation for being unsafe if they are home to a relatively high number of released inmates, making them less attractive to businesses, and contributing to unemployment, inequity, and eventually more crime.
4. Expand the boundaries of your thinking.
Ask: What else might be going on that might interrupt this loop, or make it stronger?’
Continuing with our example, we may look more broadly at social services, housing, healthcare, and employment sectors and how their actions need to be coordinated to make early jail release an effective policy.
Once you get used to asking these questions, you can start to do more sophisticated things, like looking at the types of feedback, combinations of different types of feedback loops, recurring patterns, etc. And you can start to create more complex maps, including causal loop diagrams.
Remember. In systems thinking, nothing exists in isolation. That’s why you look for connections.
Feedback loops or causal loop diagrams are simply tools to help you visualise how different elements in a system interact. This will help you recognise that actions taken today shape the outcomes of tomorrow, and that understanding the loops can help avoid pitfalls and capitalise on opportunities that others might miss.
Because in the end, the system’s thinker’s answer isn’t whether the chicken or the egg came first—it’s about understanding that they’re both part of the same ongoing, interconnected loop.
And that is something that you can adopt in your work. If instead of seeing Marketing and R&D as separate functions, you considered them part of the same interconnected loop of activities leading to your project’s success, what would change?
