.jpg)
.jpg)
The methodology of systems thinking can enable a truly 360 view of your company and your business landscape. Systems thinking can account for the ever-increasing number of variables your business strategies must consider, allow you to control this complexity, and get people, processes, and technology working together to drive revenue growth.
Systems thinking is an approach that envisions your business as a holistic system of interdependent processes. It encompasses everything that affects your operation, internally and externally. It considers price, competitors, regulation, technology, and human capital, as well as how these elements intertwine and interact.
Instead of strategising by department, compartmentalising, and compounding business siloes, systems thinking focuses on how systems, or business processes and workflows, are interdependent and part of larger systems or environments.
The methodology stems from Professor Jay Forrester's creation of the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT's Sloan School of Management in 1956.
Systems thinking allows you to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Rather than tackling a problem by looking at the workflow in a single department or approaching sales by only working with the sales team, systems thinking encourages leaders to consider the dynamics of the entire business at all times.
The big-picture view of all interdependencies can quickly highlight where efficiency already exists, where it’s needed, and even how to achieve it. A systems approach can reveal redundancies and lead to improvements that truly achieve efficiency.
Understanding every aspect of your market and business can enhance internal and external communication through empathy. Not only using systems thinking at the board level but also encouraging the approach throughout your operation can foster collaboration and goal sharing.
More profound knowledge of the connectivity and complexity of your marketplace will highlight new opportunities. Modern-day systems thinking relies on the data drawn from every touch-point of a customer journey. It provides insights into customer expectations, allowing product iteration and leading to competitive advantage.
Systems thinking is about problem-solving with winning solutions, whether efficiency and cost-savings or leveraging new markets—effective solutions combined with robust strategies equal revenue growth.
Linear thinking cannot handle modern-day complexities. Today, there are too many variables, data points, competitors, potential products, technologies, and suppliers. Systems thinking provides a clearer view of all interconnected parts. It’s a way of seeing through the chaos and finding solutions that work for a complex digital age, allowing companies to transform and stay ahead of peers.
The empathy that comes with understanding your customers' challenges and expectations right now, to put yourself in their shoes, means that you can provide a better customer experience. That could be deciding to deploy a new tool or technology to serve customers or to make changes to prices, products, or services.
Systems thinking fosters communication and collaboration, particularly across departments. Sales and marketing teams suffer substantially from a siloed linear approach. In contrast, these teams' productivity and motivation greatly improve from understanding their counterpart's activities.
In basic terms, a marketing team cannot produce collateral describing a product or service when they don’t understand how it works. Marketing must envision the workings of production or development. Likewise, a sales team needs to understand a product and a marketing team's ideas to be able to use marketing collateral to convert customers.
A systems thinking mindset can transform marketing efforts into cohesive strategic processes for consistent results.
A systems thinking approach first highlights problems and then enables leaders to see problems as opportunities. The solutions that stem from this insight, especially coupled with data-driven decision-making, are new products and services and decisions to enter new markets. Systems thinking considers future impacts and, as per the Singapore Institute of Management, can condition organisations for rapid adaptation.
Though it’s likely that you, as a business leader, can think on the macro level and adopt systems thinking easily, that’s not always the case. Moreover, larger organisations will require more than one systems thinker to effectively map all the interconnectedness and impacts of every process or change. Systems thinking is strategic thinking, and there will be people across your teams who excel at this, seek them out and make them part of a systems thinking project team.
With your systems thinkers, take a step back and holistically analyse your business, map the interconnectedness and causality of inputs, outputs, and processes. Ask what, why, when, where, how, and who for every aspect of your business operation, product, and market. Data is vital for systems thinking, as it is for every business strategy today. Map data touch points and flows and begin to develop insights to derive and improve strategies for growth.
The nature of today’s CRMs, RevOps and engagement tools is interconnectedness. These platforms are designed to be used across departments, capture every data point, augment projects, and enhance customer insights. These technologies, with today's AI and ML, envision business ecosystems and do much of the work of systems thinking for you, again helping to overcome complexity.
Growth systems design uses systems thinking to create go-to-market (GTM) strategies that optimise process and revenue operations for revenue growth.
Try 5 Ways for CEOs and CTOs to Approach Growth System Design to learn more.
.png)
.png)
.png)
