Having heard a number of conversation over the past few weeks that are very much ‘productivity’ focussed, I thought about a piece of work I was involved in a while back and how that may be a good thing to share and help people think a little bit differently about this challenge.
Causal Loops
Have you ever heard of those?
They are a method of identifying links between various factors or elements within a chosen system. A while back I read a book by Dennis Sherwood called ‘seeing the forest for the trees’, which helped me to ground a bit of thinking around this concept.
It worth mentioning that i’m not an expert authority on systems thinking for any purists out there. I just think this helps and thats the intent.
One day when I was working with a bunch of water leaders we were having a chat about some of the measures that they were using and I decided to use this method to help them think about how these worked for them.
It was really interesting where we landed.

How do I make sense of that?
Yes, my handwriting leaves a lot of room for improvement but hopefully you can read enough and it will make enough sense.
The Blue and the Red circles are both measures. One is productivity focussed, the other is quality focussed.
The arrows show a perceived or known link (dependent on what has been observed or validated with data).
The ‘O’ or the ‘S’ highlight which way the move. ‘O’ being opposite and ‘S’ being same. So if performance level goes up the manager focus goes down as it’s an opposite.
Hopefully that gives you enough to be able to follow the loops around and think about the impact in different places of driving each of those measures.
So what?
Well, if you take a look at some of the circles to the bottom left and on the left hand side of the paper, it became apparent that these represent some of the challenges this group of leaders were thinking about. By the way ‘red men’ meant non value adding work or extra demand.
What they began to realise is that by driving certain measures hard they were potentially adding to their problems.
You see , what this type of view does is create a conversation that is beyond just one perceived, linear link to a wider appreciation that there are many things at play and that taking action in a different place may have the desired impact as opposed to taking action elsewhere. In this case it began to prevent an action.

Balancing loops
This, as Dennis describes it, is a balancing loop.
It balances itself out and will continue to do so until it is disrupting in some way.
The best way to disrupt this particular loop is for leaders to change their behaviours around the measures and maybe even remove a measure from the equation. After all, if productivity is removed (the blue one), the picture will have to change.
When was the last time you looked at how the interactions play out in your world?
What unwanted impacts may you be driving by not uncovering any blind spots around interactions?