Systems for Decisions Facilitator’s Guide

This guide will help your teams and organisations identify the key variables critical to make better strategic decisions. All too often we get caught up with the ‘short-term fixes,’ but unfortunately, tend to neglect the longer-term and unintended consequences of our decisions. The ‘changing world’ is not a new phenomenon and neither is the concept of Systems Thinking. As we leverage the theory and some of the tools outlined in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994), the Systems for Decisions guide provides an updated and fresh approach to resolving the issues we face today.

The Systems for Decisions framework assists your team to:

1. Learn more about a problem. Is it a problem at all, or is it best framed as a challenge or an opportunity?
2. Determine if the problem is isolated or recurrent. If recurrent, have we any sense of the forces that are driving it?
3. Stay with a problem much longer than we are used to. The quickest way out is often the shortest way back in. We want to break any recurrent cycle that sits under a problem.
4. Identify the forces at play that sit under a problem and then break the link(s) that will interrupt a vicious cycle.
5. Move away from quick-fix solutions and move toward solutions that are transformative.
6. Reposition the business to lead change proactively with creative choices, rather than having to scramble and strain resources from a reactive position.