The Manager's Pocket Guide to Organizational Learning

Causal Loop

One approach to analyzing and understanding the complexity in our organizations is to create a graphical representation, or map, of the elements of the system, describing how and when they relate to each other. One tool for mapping these relationships is the causal loop, a diagram that tells a story about the situation. You can use the drawing to explain the dynamic interdependencies that influence behavior in your organization; when you do this with groups of employees, the barriers to improvement will become explicit and resistance will drop because people will realize that this dynamic interaction is due to the structure of the organization rather than because of some failure in them personally. The focus will shift to solutions ...