🦋 Still Fixing Symptoms? You're Looking in the Wrong Place

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Picture a busy emergency room. Doctors and nurses are working themselves to exhaustion, frequently making mistakes under pressure. From their perspective, the problem is obvious: they need more staff, more resources, and better training.

But if we zoom out, we see the issue isn't just within the ER itself. Perhaps hospital administration is cutting budgets based on financial models that don't account for patient surges. Maybe the local primary care system is underfunded, pushing more non-emergencies to the ER. Or perhaps the discharge process is so inefficient that beds stay occupied longer than necessary, creating a backlog.

Each person involved—the ER staff, administration, local clinics—is trying their best within their corner of the system, yet the whole system struggles. They are all staring at the problem, but from different, fragmented angles, leading to frustration and fragmented solutions.

Last time, we explored the Iceberg Model, showing how problems often have deeper roots than what's immediately visible. This "Understaffed Hospital" scenario is a perfect example of how focusing on just the "event" or "pattern" can lead us down the wrong path. Today, we will explore what else you can do to get to the root cause of the challenges you are facing, in order to exercise leadership on a whole different level👇

🔭 Zooming Out: Your Map to Clarity

When a patient presents with a recurring headache, a novice doctor might just prescribe painkillers, treating only the symptom. A great diagnostician, however, zooms out. They don't just look at the head; they look at the patient's entire system. They ask about stress at work, diet, sleep patterns, and family history – treating the whole patient, not just one organ. They understand the headache isn't the problem, but a signal from a stressed system.

Zooming out in your work is the same. It's the discipline of looking past the immediate pain point and diagnosing the health of the entire system. It means consciously shifting your perspective to see the broader context and the intricate relationships within your system.

🗺️ How to Start Mapping Out The System?

1. Identify the Key Stakeholders (The System's Parts) 

Think beyond your immediate team. Who is directly or indirectly affected by, or has influence over, the problem? In the hospital's case, this includes ER staff, administration, primary care providers, social workers handling discharges, and even local government. These are the "parts" on your map.

2. Understand Key Relationships (Observing Group Dynamics) 

How do these parts interact? Note the formal structures (org charts, processes) and the crucial informal ones (trust, favors, reputations). How do resource decisions from administration impact frontline morale? Is there tension between nursing staff and discharge planners? Observing these dynamics—how teams really communicate, where conflicts arise, how decisions are actually made—reveals the system's true wiring.

3. Uncover Stated and Hidden Goals

This is where the real leverage is. Everyone has a goal, but some are hidden.

• Stated Goals: What each leader or department says they want ("excellent patient care," "maintain profitability").

• Hidden Goals: The unspoken, often self-protective drivers (administration prioritizing "quarterly financial targets" over staffing; clinics trying to "protect limited resources" by referring cases). Understanding these hidden goals illuminates why seemingly irrational patterns persist.

4. Talk to the Right People (Beyond Your Echo Chamber)

To build an accurate map, you must gather diverse perspectives. Don't just talk to people who agree with you. Turn on your curiosity and seek out:

• People at the Edges: Those on the frontline or at handoff points between teams. They see the real-world friction.

• The Unofficial Mayors: People who hold informal authority & power (trust, favors, Slack DMs, reputations). The go-to people who know "how things really work."

• Skeptics and Outliers: They often see the system's failure points before anyone else.

🧠 The Real Goal: A Mindset Shift

Mapping a system isn't about creating a perfect prediction. It's about learning. The goal is to develop multiple, plausible interpretations of what's really driving an outcome, like persistent ER overcrowding.

This process inherently cultivates empathy and curiosity. When you consider other perspectives and hidden drivers, you become less triggered and more strategic. This leads to a crucial realization 👇

⚙️ Bad System Always Beat Good People

A system on its own can often direct results almost independently of how individual people in the system behave. It's not always about "bad doctors" or "lazy nurses"; often, it's about dedicated professionals operating within a system that inadvertently produces undesirable results. By zooming out, you shift from treating individual "problem people" to understanding and treating the "problematic organization" – or rather, the problematic system itself.

🔍 Your Diagnostic Toolkit: Questions to Ask Yourself

• What is the broader context of this problem? Who else is affected?

• What other teams or organizations interact with it? What are the relationships (formal and informal) between us?

• Do I know enough, or do I need to learn more? From whom?

• Is the key problem located within my team, in another part of the system, or in the relationship between parts?

• What is my position in this system? Where do I need to build more trust or create new alliances to make progress?

🚀 Application: Your Next Steps

Ready to put this into practice?

1. Pick a Recurring Problem: Choose one persistent challenge at work or in your personal life that feels stuck (perhaps a lingering team conflict or a consistently missed goal).

2. Identify Key Stakeholders: Who are all the players involved or affected by this problem? List them out, even those who seem peripheral to your initial view.

3. Map Relationships & Goals: For each stakeholder, note their formal and informal role, their known interactions, and what you think their stated & hidden goals might be related to this problem.

4. Create Several Interpretations: Given the information you have, what do you think is happening? Create several hypotheses and start testing them out (next step).

5. Learn: Based on Steps 3 & 4, see who you need to talk to, to learn more, build more trust, and test your interpretations.

6. Design Intervention: Revisit your Step 4, incorporate what you have learned in Step 5, and design your first intervention to start making progress (schedule a meeting, or speak up in a particular meeting, or schedule more 1-on-1s to learn more, etc.)

Most people are stuck arguing about the view from their own window. A true visionary learns to see the entire building. Zooming out is your invitation to that higher vantage point, where blame dissolves into understanding and frustration evolves into strategy. Don't just react to the world as it is; start redesigning it.

Next week, we will delve deeper into the idea of embracing contradiction to become a complex thinker to further support your systems thinking & leadership journey ✊

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