We live in a complex, rapidly changing world. In order to support our stakeholders and our organizations, we need to expand our view and adopt a systems thinking mindset. This allows you to see the whole and the interconnectedness between the parts, which in turn allows you to help stakeholders make the right decisions.

Systems thinking makes business agility possible. With business agility, your organization is able to sense its external environment, really work out what’s significant, and then respond to it.

To be really agile, your organization needs to see what’s changing. It needs to work out how it needs to change and then it needs to actually do it. Many organizations see that there is a strategic problem and something they really need to do, but they can’t quite configure themselves to respond to it. Business analysis is central to that because you think about sensing and seeing what’s coming.

There’s a huge amount of strategic business analysis that fits into that space. You think about assessing how to change and there’s a lot of solution evaluation, problem solving, and understanding that fits in that space.

Who’s Responsible for Strategic Systems Thinking?

There’s often a belief that the top c-level executives should be doing this analysis. In reality, systems thinking and strategic thinking should happen at all levels. Think about what might change out in the world and how it might have an impact on how this project runs or how this product will need to incrementally change.

Understanding what’s going on outside our organization or even internal – it can be “what if the priorities of this department change or what if we lose this key person” or some other event. That speaks to systems thinking; understanding the upstream and downstream impacts as well as all the pieces that are at work in a delivery system.

We may write process and procedure manuals, but nobody really thinks about how they can adapt. So when something unexpected happens or some competitive threat comes along, we haven’t built variety into the processes. We lean out all of the slack and there can be times when that’s necessary. Systems thinking would encourage us to look more holistically and to recognize the complexity and to think about how the environment might change. Business analysis is a big part of that.

Listen to the full episode for tools you can use to apply systems thinking and tips on providing next level value to your stakeholders and organization.

• Adrian Reed’s Blog: https://www.adrianreed.co.uk/
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Adrian Reed

Adrian is a Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions.  He also speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change.

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