Resources for It’s Not Broken: Diving Into CX Systems

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

Thanks for coming to my talk at ElevateCX Atlanta in October, 2023. During the talk, we covered three points:

  1. The myth of the broken system

  2. Model systems to drive clarity

  3. Know your feedback loops

But the talk was just an introduction! I’ve included resources below for you to dive deeper into adaptive leadership and thinking in systems.

👇 Many of the resources are from my newsletter, Customers, Etc. If you like what you read, sign up below!

The Myth of the Broken System

  • Book: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow

    • If you’ve ever had the challenge of navigating complex organizational challenges and have had difficulty making progress, this book provides a framework for making sense of the situation and tools for effecting change.

  • The Illusion of the Broken System - This post from the Customers, Etc. newsletter provides a quick introduction to central introductory theme from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

Modeling Systems

Modeling systems can get rather complex because systems can get rather complex. We barely scratched the surface in my talk, but if you’re interested in diving deeper and want to try your hand at making your own system diagrams, you may find these resources helpful:

  • Book: Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.

    • This is not a business book, but I still highly recommend it because it’s such a helpful and concise introduction to systems thinking. This book goes beyond stocks, flows, and feedback loops and discusses interesting (and challenging!) ways that systems behave and tactics to work with them.

Because Thinking in Systems isn’t a business book and I wanted to try to relate systems thinking to my work, I did a nine-post series in my Customers, Etc. newsletter about systems thinking.

The introductory posts will have a lot of similarity to the content in my ElevateCX talk. If you need a primer, start here:

The following posts pick up where my conference talk ends. This is where the real power of systems thinking comes into play:

  • Drift to Low Performance - This is a well-understood system problem that is easy to let creep into your team if you’re not careful.

  • High Performance Standards - This post provides an systems approach as an answer to drift to low performance.

  • Process Analysis - Systems diagrams and process analysis diagrams aren’t the same, but it’s interesting to think about them together.

  • Information Flow - This might be my favorite post in the series because it talks about hidden positive reinforcing feedback loops and very simple ways to implement them.

  • Modeling the Support System in HASH - I took a brief diversion to explore systems modeling in a tool called HASH

Slides

I usually don’t go out of my way to share my slides because most of the content is my speaking over the slides and not in the slides themselves. However, seeing as how there were quite a few systems diagrams in this talk, I’ve included the slides below:

Lastly, if you’re interested in these topics, but you’re not sure where to start, don’t hesitate to reach out.