Matt StrömReading Donella Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems.” a. It’s a great book, please read it, and b. It’s reinforcing my belief that optimism or pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Rian van der Merwe@mattstrom It’s next on my list! Purchased immediately after reading https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/
Abhishek Nandakumar@mattstrom this is for sure true, and I’m always sensitive about the blast radius of emotions felt by leaders because they have a 1:N effect on their teams, often irreversible. Curious about if the book offers pragmatic tools to channel this energy effectively, because I imagine things are never as good as they seem and also never as bad as they seem, and I’ve found systems thinkers might often be unable to appreciate the gradient in between the discrete choices they have to make
@xabhishek I'd love to know more about what you mean by "the gradient in between the discrete choices they have to make"! Maybe we can chat about it soon :)
@mattstrom when you are making business decisions while building a new system, you have to often lower risk/cost of uncertainty by looking at discrete choices (user segments, features, scalability, etc) to bootstrap it. Good systems thinkers are often banking on the fact that their choices leave the door open to future expansion to those they’ve decided not to serve at the moment. But that optionality is rarely codified in execution leaving them locked behind one path and prone to disruption.
@mattstrom this is where prototyping solutions on that gradient of choice is a fairly cheap way to form good instincts for where you might need to intentionally leave the door open. Teams that skip this step hit a growth bottleneck beyond their initial focus.