| Several years ago, I was teaching a university level class in systems thinking. One evening, I walked into class with two black eyes. "What happened?" asked a sympathetic student. "I was playing goalie on my soccer team. I came out of the net to block a shot and took the puck right in the face and it broke my glasses. It was a freak occurrence."
One week later, I walked into the same class on crutches and plopped down on a chair. "What happened this time?" inquired a student. "I was trying to cut down the angle on a breakaway. I slid into the oncoming attacker and pulled my muscle. But I stopped the goal and was a hero! It was purely an accident."
One week after that, I walked into the same class with two broken fingers. The same question was posed. "I leapt into the air for a high shot and the ball caught the ends of my fingers, bending them backwards and breaking them. It was a freak accident. They shouldn't have broken."
"But, Richard, these are not just random events! What is the pattern here?" asked Sean, a rather astute student. He wasright. I try to help my students see the world in terms of patterns and structures that support the patterns and not just in random, freak events. In this case, I was seeing these events as random events. In fact, the pattern was a series of injuries, one per game. The underlying structure that created the pattern: I was a 47-yearold playing in a 20-year-old's league. That structure created the pattern of injuries to me. I retired shortly after that insight.
See the world in terms of patterns and the structures that support the patterns and not just in random, freak events.
Reflection.
Is there anything in this story that rings true for you? Are disconcerting events at work home connected? Does your child's pattern of acting out have an underlying structure - perhaps it occurs after a heavy dose of sugar? Is an employee late or absent every Monday? The underlying structure for that pattern might be alcohol consumption over the weekend.
Try this.
Your homework for the rest of your life is to be a systems sleuth! Move from an event orientation to an event-pattern-structure orientation. When something disconcerting happens, reflect on it to see if there were any other similar events that have also happened. What is the pattern? And if there is a pattern, what is the underlying structure causing the pattern?
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