60s from six passenger vehicles to four passenger vehicles.
That has to do with the size of the families that people had,
who's being carried in the car.
That's seeing how the car,
as a transportation mode for, not an individual, but the family, and
you don't understand that by taking the car apart.
You only understand that by understanding the car's role in society and
who's using it.
So, there's clearly one example of a systems perspective and
how it makes sense to do that.
So, if you really want to understand the why questions then I think you need to do
this synthesis.
Take something to be explained, see it in it's containing whole.
Some of the work done by Russell Ackoff would always talk about the education
system.
Why do class schools and classes looked the way they do?
Why do they have one teacher and why do they have 20 to 25 to 30 students?
What's that all about?
Well, you can take it apart and you can understand how the education system works.
But understanding how the school system works in society or the university or
the college works in society, you'd have to use systems thinking.
What is this preparing them to do?
What is being taught?
What role does that play?
And perhaps we need to do a better job of that in terms of the educational system of
our country and other countries.
But this question of understanding the how things work versus why they work,
and what purpose they have.
When we want to get the purpose we need the system's thinking piece.
>> Those are great examples and makes me think of,
in organizations often of times there is a problem going on and
we try to figure out what it is in that division.
And it usually is connected to other things that are going on in
the organization.
So I think it's such an important reminder.
>> And it's just struck in hearing your response there as well.
When we do focus on the problems, we often times know what we don't like.
And if we work to get rid of what we don't want,
it's not necessarily the same thing as getting what you want.
So fixing the problems or removing the problems,
as opposed to really idealizing and understanding what it is we would do
if we could do anything we want sort of constraint free and
really thinking about possibilities, leads to different solutions.
And it's much the same with this positive framing that Ramia talked about earlier.
>> So, the question is, when I'm getting all the systemic components or
I'm looking at a whole, one of the fears that I have,
isn't that too much information to consider?
Wouldn't it lead to paralysis because I have so much to comprehend?
>> Well, I guess there's always that question of sort of overload.
But it's a different set of questions that we're asking.
And the important thing I think here is that if you're really trying to understand
purpose and possibility, that's a different space.
You'd need a different workspace to do that.
When we're trying to fine tune the production system, or the delivery
system of our products and services and make sure things are efficient,
that's production mode, that's what we do very well.
But in organizations, we also need this, I will call it, discovery space.
When it's not about solving problems or fixing things or
getting rid of problems but understanding possibilities,
formulating the problems in a way that involves different ways of thinking.
We need that five year in our meeting to talked about the playful ways to thinking
about things.
And the more we do that and expand our thinking using systems thinking the more
we can see possibilities that normally were obstructed from us.
We don't have the budget for that.
Back in the George Washington Bridge story, long ago-
>> I was just thinking of that, yes.
>> The maintenance department didn't have money to do those things.
That was beyond its budget so it's going to be constrained.
If we start thinking about the resources we have, then our designs are always going
to be constrained by real time, money, talent, issues.
