The Art of Thinking In Systems: Improve Your Logic, Think More Critically, and Use Proven Systems to Solve Your Problems - Strategic Planning for Everyday Life

If moving beyond shallow awareness of systems thinking is your goal, start by studying the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge.

The problem is that when we fail to take the time to examine our internal systems as well, sometimes our solutions create new problems. These problems can be significant, serious, and very hard to overcome, if they are really ingrained in the structure of a system.

It is only by being willing to listen to all perspectives that you can truly get to the heart of the problem.

When we allow our standards to be impacted by our past performance and negative perception of it, we are setting our systems up for failure as we allow them to drift toward low performance and take our goals and expectations right along with them. In order to combat this, we need to keep our standards steadfast despite dips in performance and expect that we will rise to meet them. If we do this, we can flip the script and start drifting toward better performance.