CHAPTER 4
Systems Thinking and Senior Leadership
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong. This maxim has been attributed at various times to Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Peter Drucker as a wake-up call to managers who mistakenly think that making a change in just one part of a complex problem will cure the ails of an entire system. Everyday management thinking too often looks for straightforward cause and effect relationships in problem solving that ignore the effect on, and feedback from, the entire system.1
—RON ZEMKE, “SYSTEMS THINKING”
The U.S. Army War College suggests that senior leadership often takes place in an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Problems in ...
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