I am not a systems kind of person. I have no idea how an internal combustion engine works. Economics eludes me. I have never written a three-year plan, budgeted my time or my money, or set up a filing system that works better than the piles of books and articles that spring up wherever I go.

Not that I haven't tried. I have several piles of books and articles on how to develop systems of organization for my time, my finances, my closets. I have read every one of them. I have invested in software programs designed to impose order on my files, my notes, my thoughts. I have tried everything from mind mapping to alphabetizing my spice rack, but entropy always prevails.

Still, hope springs eternal, and I keep believing that one day I will find The Method that will work to tidy up all my messy processes. So when the Jugglezine editor suggested a piece on applying systems thinking to one's personal life, I thought: This could be it.

Basic loops
Anyone who was employed by a mid-to-large-sized organization in the early 90s has probably attended a seminar or workshop on systems thinking or at least had Peter Senge's seminal book The Fifth Discipline pressed upon him or her by an enthusiastic believer. For those too young to remember--or old enough to find themselves vaguely thinking that The Fifth Discipline was a 70s rock group--I will present the basic idea behind systems thinking, as I understand it. (Or, for a less personal approach, see this overview.)

The first thing you need to know is that systems thinking is not something you do in your head. You do it with pencil, paper, and loops. (There are also software programs that will draw the loops for you and let you run simulations of hypothetical systems. I tried one. It is not for beginners.)

The loops represent interactions between parts of a system (and a system is any group of interacting parts). In contrast to more traditional types of analysis, which focus on linear relationships of cause and effect, input and output, systems thinking favors circular representations indicating that problems have no beginning and no end or, as one poetic systems thinker puts it:

. . . no cause, no effect, not one can be found
in closed loops going around and around.

There are two kinds of loops. Reinforcing loops are used to depict situations in which an action produces a result that promotes more of the same action. A nice example in family life is the situation in which, as a parent spends more time at home, the family becomes happier, and as the family becomes happier, the parent wishes to spend more time at home.

Balancing loops represent situations in which actions are taken to bridge the gap between a desired state and the actual, current state. Family life, of course, is full of these situations. When the refrigerator becomes empty, someone goes to the grocery store to restore it to its desired, full state. When sock drawers become empty, someone does laundry. When stomachs become empty, someone cooks. These cycles, I don't have to tell you, repeat endlessly.

Getting the big picture
Theoretically, you could diagram any situation in your life using combinations of balancing and reinforcing loops. Getting yourself to work in the morning, for example, involves a big reinforcing loop (getting to work allows you to keep your job, which in turn requires you to get to work) that intersects with many other loops of both types. Depending on your personal situation, these might include alarm-setting-snooze-button-hitting rituals, coffee bean supply cycles, and your daycare provider's own getting to work in the morning system (which of course has its own set of intersecting loops).

It can all get quite complex quite quickly, but that is the point of the exercise: to end up with a picture of the Big Picture. In the systems thinking world-view a person or organization is never an isolated entity reacting to outside forces. It is always a participant in a larger system, which is a participant in a still larger system.

As a result, one of the most gratifying things about looking at things from this perspective is that there are no bad guys. System interrelationships make their own crises. Because every cause is also an effect, no one is to blame.

Some templates
Getting to the big picture can be tricky for the uninitiated, I found, and some of the approach's strongest proponents admit that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient at applying this somewhat counterintuitive perspective to everyday situations. Fortunately, systems researchers have identified some generic models or archetypes that you can use as templates for your own diagrams. I was able to use the poignantly titled "Tragedy of the Commons" archetype, for instance, to illustrate why there is never any milk for breakfast at my house. Picture each of my teenage sons and his friends as little (well, not so little) milk-consuming reinforcing loops all drawing on a common but limited resource without a thought for the morrow. The solution here is not, as I have learned from experience, to buy more milk (teenage boys are apparently at least temporarily exempt from the "Limits to Growth" archetype), but, as Senge writes in The Fifth Discipline, to "manage the commons" through "educating everyone and creating forms of self-regulation and peer pressure."

Senge uses another archetype, "Success to the Successful," to illustrate the structure of work/family imbalance. It consists of two reinforcing loops, the "time with family" cycle I described above (more time at home increases family happiness which increases the desire to spend more time at home) and a similar "time at work" loop in which more time at work leads to greater success at work which leads to still more time at work. The two loops are linked in the balancing loop of life by the limited resource of time. If time at work increases, there is less time available to be home with the family and vice versa.

As Senge points out, the "Success to the Successful" model tends to be inherently unstable, because as soon as you devote a bit more of the precious resource to one loop, the resulting success increases the desirability of investing even more in that loop. Meanwhile, the other loop, getting less of the resource, begins to be less successful and starts to look like a bad investment.

Once you recognize that you're stuck in an archetype like this, you can begin to look at other intersecting loops for ways to change the structure of the system. Maybe the Tuesday night bowling league with work-team members isn't absolutely necessary to success on the job. Maybe starting work an hour earlier so you can be home for dinner would be enough to tip the scales back into equilibrium. The thing to keep in mind, systems thinkers tell us, is that there are usually several possible approaches to take, and none of them is perfect. Neither is any of them final, because, as long as the system that is you continues to live and operate in the world, the loops never stop.

A note on order, or how I learned to love my mess
My brush with systems thinking didn't help me clean up my messy processes. Instead, it taught me to embrace them.

It turns out that systems thinking isn't about being systematic or neat and tidy. Sometimes a degree of messiness in a system is essential--especially when creativity is involved. When I attempted to diagram the process I use to write an essay for jugglezine, for example, my balancing loop (getting me from the initial state of blank screen to the desired state of finished piece) intersected with many others: my research process, general work load, children's activity levels, relative health of my electronic equipment, etc.--and one mysterious loop that a friend suggested I label "And Then a Miracle Occurs."

Looking at the big picture, I realized that the murky area represented by this loop, the one I have been trying to eliminate or at least systematize all of my writing life, is in fact an essential and legitimate part of my process. And the fact that you are reading this sentence testifies to the notion that one great benefit of systems thinking lies in the way it can reflect back to us the inescapable loopiness of human existence.

Writer Debra Wierenga would like to thank Joe Lane of Crowbar Associates for helping the miracle occur one more time.