Thinking About Thinking: Systems Thinking

It’s vital to be realistic about your capacity – particularly with so much demand on SBL’s time. In this continuation of her series on thinking, Emma Gray helps you to start connecting the dots

As much as I’d like to be superhuman, I need downtime, I need to sleep and I need to occasionally spend time with my family! I hope you have managed to protect your one-hour-per-week thinking time, because you will now be seeing real impact and it will be forming a vital work-skill habit. If not, just keep trying to allocate the time and accept that it’s not always going to be possible.

The thinking we have done so far has presented us with some amazing ideas to explore, decisions to make and actions to implement. Now we need to think about how they will all work together. Nothing in the work of an SBL happens in isolation. You are not going to be able action your six strategy headline improvements individually one by one, it will all happen in a jumble – and you’ll still need to do the day job and see your family!

Linking Your Ideas

This is where systems thinking comes in – we spend some time thinking about how our ideas are linked, and how we might collate our actions into headings, or ‘drivers’, to enable us to manage everything happening at once.

For example, from my Mind Map and STEEPLE thinking, I’ve got two strategy headlines, which at first seem totally unconnected.

• Enable governors to improve their understanding of financial risks and use financial reporting to drive their strategic decision making
• Enable support for stakeholders to build effective staffing structures, promoting ambition for success and a culture of continuous improvement

The actions I’ve attached to these two headlines share one vital ‘driver’ which, when implemented, will instantly increase the likelihood of success of my subsequent actions. In addition, identifying one driver, to support more than one of your strategy headlines will also inform the priority of the actions you are planning to implement.

Getting Started on System Thinking

This feels complicated, doesn’t it? You’ve identified improvement, you’ve solved problems, you’ve made decisions, you’ve got actions, why not just get started? Taking a moment to look at an overview of your strategy will save you time in the long run, but it needs all the thinking skills you have developed so far and will stretch your ability to turn actions on paper into something you can actually achieve.

So, turn a clean double page in your notebook to landscape and write along the bottom of the page your six strategy headlines. Above them, in no particular order or linked to any headline, using all the actions you have decided upon, start to write down the over-arching, or generic, drivers.

Examples of these drivers might be.

Improve communication

Create systems of policy monitoring

Agree calendar of events

Carry out surveys or reviews

Implement training

Research a subject area

Then, attach all your actions under these driver headings. Some actions will come under more than one driver, but that serves to identify which actions need to be implemented first! Following that, you can draw lines between the strategy headlines and the drivers it needs. It is likely that your six headlines will need three or four drivers.

Gaining New Ideas

Both the strategy headlines from my earlier example depend on the driver of ‘Improve Communication’. This is what I need to do first. I need to improve my systems of communication so that stakeholders have what they need to make informed financial decisions and build effective staffing structures. One way I might do this by sourcing some training for me and a colleague on Integrated Curriculum Financial Planning (ICFP) as that would support both strategy headlines.

By skipping the systems thinking stage of the process you might never have considered ICFP training as an action on an individual headline, but when you use systems thinking to look at an overview, you have identified a relatively quick win, or SMART action, in that it is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. It has a quantifiable cost implication, and it is an action that will enable evaluation and reflection. This promotes additional thinking threads for future thinking hours.

There are several ways to do the systems thinking process, and it might be fun to enlist a fellow SBL to do it with you. Post-it notes on a whiteboard are a fun way to build linked drivers and actions onto your headlines, and you can move them about as those ideas develop. Remember to take a photo with your phone when your thinking hour is up, in case your Post-it notes are the not-so-sticky variety!

We’ve just got one last stage of the thinking process to do, and it is an important one – communication. Next time we will look at ways to help you effectively communicate your strategies, get support from others and get started on those actions…at last!

Keep thinking.