If you know how to
make soup, you already know a lot about systems thinking.
At CI this month we launched our
MOOC,* the
Climate Leader, an introduction to the skills of systems thinking for
people taking action on climate change.
There’s no
one-size-fits-all definition of a systems thinker, but this afternoon as I
puttered in the kitchen, it occurred to me that soup making offers a pretty
good metaphor. Here’s a short list of things that all systems thinkers and all
soup makers know:
The quality of the whole depends on the health of the parts.
The best carrots in
the world won’t save the soup if the cabbage is old and rubbery. The
best-resourced sales team in the world can’t save a business if the engineering
department is stagnating. Pouring more wealth into the top 1% of families won’t
produce vibrancy in the whole society if other families are struggling.
To get good results you have to look beneath the surface and
back in time.
A major factor the
deliciousness of my pot of soup today is that all the ingredients were grown
right in our backyard. The freshness, the taste, the texture, the nutrients,
all derive from the conditions of the soil, the care of the harvest, the
attention to storage and preservation.
Focus on the health of the parts, and the quality of the
process - then let the results emerge from your efforts.
You might know the individual tastes of potatoes, squash, beans, and leeks and still not quite know how the
soup that melds them all would taste. This is emergence, that quality that is so
mysterious and so fundamental to our lives, our communities, and our
collaborations. Systems thinkers and soup makers both focus on quality, take
care with the process, and then sit back and allow the magic of system (or the
soup) to reveal itself.
Like any art form
there's more to systems thinking, and more to soup making, than these three
simple ideas. But they are a start, and I'd welcome your additions to this
short list.
*MOOC = Massive Open
Online Course
