Community leaders could use some help. They are confronted with increasingly complex problems requiring a wide range of technical knowledge. Also, citizens seem more on edge; and they’re demanding results. As we suffer the unintended consequences of many earlier decisions, it’s becoming clear that some of those decisions didn’t dig deeply enough or account for long- term effects. They seem to have focused narrowly, only treated symptoms, missing the underlying causes that persist today. This old pattern can be reversed by whole-system thinking , which accounts for complexity and long-term effects, and that digs deep to target causes. It’s a way to tackle problems that is far more likely to lead to durable solutions. It’s a way to design solutions that work better and are better for the environment. It’s the practice of identifying and understanding the relationships among a system’s parts, rather than just the parts themselves, in order to solve important problems. Whole-system thinking is not new. Expressions such as ”He can’t see the forest for the trees” the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” “vicious circle,” and “thinking outside the box,” affirm that being able to see the big picture has long been regarded as important. But our industrial past pushed society away

from thinking in terms of entire systems. Highly skilled decision- makers and designers often define problems too narrowly, without identifying their causes or connections, which merely shifts or amplifies problems. In fact, many of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too- narrow thinking. Take cars, for example: Driven by complexity, automotive engineers and designers tend to specialize. One person’s job is to make a given component or subsystem the best it can be. As a result, the modern automobile has evolved, through an incremental process of small improvements to individual components, without much change to the overall concept. Specialization and incrementalization has stifled sweeping innovation and possibly led to loss of market share. The problem with blind specialization is that optimizing isolated parts often ”pessimizes” the greater system—complexity, over-sizing, and inefficiency abound. With cars, that means unnecessary fuel costs and air pollution.

This kind of ”silo” thinking limits opportunities, innovation, and creativity. In contrast, whole-system thinking cuts across occupations, departments, and disciplines —typically revealing smarter, integrative-design solutions that transcend ideological and turf battles and unite all parties around shared goals. A local example of silo thinking takes place among the plethora of public service jurisdictions found in most communities. For example, sewer systems, run by sewer district boards, are profoundly affected by water-district and county decisions, but controlled by different people who seldom, if ever, talk to one another. Sewer district board members often fail to understand the goals and challenges of the county as it approves new subdivisions or the water district as it expands capacity. Instead, the board treats symptoms by adding sewer capacity and raising taxes to pay for it, claiming it’s just responding to demand over which is has no authority. Symptom fixes are often attractive to decision makers because they tend to be visible, often dramatic, fast acting, and apparently logical. They make decision makers look good …in the short run. In sharp contrast, solutions that address causes are often less intuitive, less dramatic, slower to take effect, and sometimes more difficult to measure. They require courageous and creative leaders who collaborate and consider whole systems.

Though whole-system thinking is often well served by technical information, participating does not necessarily require technical background. Anyone can do it.