Learning to “Think Systems”

“We continuously admonish ourselves for what we do or do not do and continually implore each other to be different. There appears to be an infinite supply of people available to tell us the “right” way to think and the “right” way to act. The vast majority of the admonitions and directives that swirl around us are hopelessly entangled in subjectivity. Depending on the phenomenon under consideration, we blame some thing, some person, some group, some whatever for its presence. We blame genes, chemicals, parents, schools, a variety of “bad” influences, and certain politicians for what goes wrong. Probably the most important subjectivity determined block to observing human behavior has been the earlier described difficulty in seeing the part oneself plays in the functioning of others. Our conceptualizations of human behavior have consistently deemphasized the process between people and focused on the process within people”.

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Thinking Systems in the Workplace: A CEO’s Reflection

Authored by Leslie Ann Fox

As a recently retired CEO (2 ½ years ago), and currently a faculty member of the Center for Family Consultation,  I have been using the lens of Bowen family  systems thinking to reflect on the evolution of my thirty-nine year old healthcare consulting company, founded by myself and two partners in 1976 and sold in 2015. With the benefit of some distance from the organization, I am working to better understand my evolution as a leader, and how the performance of …

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