THE POWER OF SYSTEMS

You are a system! Most fundamentally you are a mind-body-emotion system that takes “data” or “information” from the world and transforms it into your own personal, unique, and idiosyncratic mental-emotional maps that you then use to navigate life and all of the challenges of life. You are an information-process-and-outputting system. It is the very nature of your mind-body system as you use your neurology to “abstract” from the electromagnetic spectrum that informs you of events in the world, take that data into your nervous-system-and-brain system, process and filter that information, and then output it in terms of energy, emotions, and actions. [This, by the way, is the content of the NLP Communication Model.]

And you are also a system which lives inside of multiple embedded systems. So you are not just one system, you are multiple systems. In addition to your mind-body-emotion system, there is your language system, family system, religious system, ethnic system, business system, political system, and so on. Is it any wonder then that you are systemically complex as a person and that your “way of being in the world” is most essentially systemic?

What does all this have to do with empowerment? Well, if you want to be empowered in an effective and informed way as a person in moving through the world, you will definitely want to recognize these systems, how they operate, what they are doing, and how they are all interacting. You will also want to know how to think in terms of systems, how to communicate systemically, and how to act and relate systemically. If you are a system within systems, doesn’t that make sense?

But what if you do not learn to think, communicate, act, and relate systemically? If you do not, then the likelihood is that any one or more of these systems will have you rather than you having the systems. Think about that: The system will have you! That’s what Morpheus told Neo in the movie, “The Matrix,” “The Matrix is a system of control.” Compare that to what Quality Theorist and Expert, W. Edwards Deming once said about problems in organizations. “90% of the problems within an organization are system problems, not individual problems.”

System problems means that the problem lies in the very system, as it is set up and operating. And that means that any and every person within that system will experience the same problems and interferences. In these cases, the person is not the problem, the system is the problem. And so often with us—in many cases, we are not the problem, you are not the problem— “the system” is the problem. It may be the meaning-system, it could be the intention-system, it could be the strategy- system, the language-system, the cultural-system, the political-system, and so on. And in such cases, if you want to find your powers and take effective action, you will do so by learning to think, speak, act, and relate systemically.

Regarding the power of a system, one of the central powers that any and every system has is that it operates to achieve an outcome. This is what systems are designed and organized to do. They are designed to achieve some outcome. As some do, they spin out of control and become run-away systems (escalating systems). Others are designed as homoeostatic systems so that they maintain a healthy balance between various forces. This is especially true of living biological systems.

What is your mind-body-emotion system designed to do? What self-organizing attractors have you set in your system? To ask these questions is to ask about your system of values and beliefs, your internal system intentions and purposes, and your system of orientation as you move through life, work, career, relationships, etc. It is asking you to begin to think systemically.

Once set, your thinking-perceiving-noticing-sorting system (your meta-programs and other higher meta- levels) are organized to see what you have designed it to see. So also your belief-understanding- decision system. And while from outside the system, it may be toxic, destructive, and dysfunctional, from inside the system it makes perfect sense and is well-intentioned to achieve something that it thinks will be helpful and beneficial. It is this which creates the blind spots in our mental-emotional systems.

We have just released the latest book in the Meta-Coaching series, Systemic Coaching (2012). This book is especially written to enable you to fully appreciate the power of systems and to use systems thinking, speaking, acting, and relating when working with a human mind-body-emotion system. Of course, it is especially focused on the communication excellence that we call “coaching.” In it you will find that I have set out the characteristics of a system and how these characteristics and variables interact in the human system and knowing that you will then see how they can be effectively used in the context of coaching someone for greater empowerment in service of unleashing the person’s highest and best potentials.