Everything is interconnected: the physical world, social systems, your innermost thoughts, the unrelenting logic of the computer—everything forms one immense, interconnected system of reality. Nothing exists in isolation; everything is part of the system and part of a larger context.
Because of that inconvenient fact of reality, small things can have unexpectedly large effects. That disproportionate effect is the hallmark of nonlinear systems, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the real world is decidedly nonlinear.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
➤ John Muir, 1911, My First Summer in the Sierra
Throughout this book, you’ll find activities or differences that seem to be so subtle or inconsequential that they couldn’t possibly make a difference. These are activities such as thinking a thought to yourself vs. speaking it out loud or such as writing a sentence on a piece of paper vs. typing it into an editor on the computer. Abstractly, these things should be perfectly equivalent.
But they aren’t.
These kinds of activities utilize very different pathways in the brain—pathways that are affected by your very thoughts and how you think them. Your thoughts are not disconnected from the rest of the brain machinery or your body; it’s all connected. This is just one example (and we’ll talk more about the brain later in the book), but it helps illustrate the importance of thinking about interacting systems.
In his seminal book The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization [Sen94], Peter Senge popularized the term systems thinking to describe a different approach of viewing the world. In systems thinking, one tries to envision an object as a connection point of several systems, rather than as a discrete object unto itself.
Everything is interconnected.
For instance, you might consider a tree to be a single, discrete object sitting on the visible ground. But in fact, a tree is a connection of at least two major systems: the processing cycle of leaves and air and of roots and earth. It’s not static; it’s not isolated. And even more interesting, you’ll rarely be a simple observer of a system. More likely, you’ll be part of it, whether you know it or not.[3]
| Recipe 1 | Always consider the context. |
Put a copy of that up on your wall or your desktop, in your conference room, on your whiteboard, or anywhere you think alone or with others. We’ll be returning to it.