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Product Description
Systems thinking can help you tame the complexity of real-world problems by providing a structured way of balancing a broad, overall view with the selection of the right level of detail, truly allowing you to "see the forest for the trees". Only by taking a broad view can we avoid the twin dangers of a silo mentality-in which a fix 'here' simply shifts the problem to 'there'-and organisational myopia-in which a fix 'now' gives rise to a much bigger problem to fix 'then'. Seeing the Forest for the Trees will give you all the tools and techniques you need, with many practical examples as diverse as managing a busy back office, negotiating an outsourcing deal and formulating business strategy.
About the Author
Dennis Sherwood was for twelve years a consulting partner with Coopers & Lybrand and was subsequently an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs in London, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and Vice President of SRI Consulting. Educated at the universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and a Sloan Fellow, with Distinction, of the London Business School, he is now the Managing Director of Organica Consulting which specialised in building competitive advantage through innovation whose clients include Thames Water, Nestle, National Grid, Pearson TV, The Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, Wedgewood, and Yorkshire Electricity. He is a is well-known on the conference circuit and is the author of five previous books including Smart Things to Know About Innovation and Unlock Your Mind. Visit www.organicaconsulting.com for more information.
Inside This Book
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent book for learning about system dynamics,
By A Customer
This review is from: Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking (Paperback)
If you want to learn how to draw causal loop diagrams and use them in your work, this is the book for you.The book is extremely comprehensive, yet easy to read and written in a style that makes you feel like the author is personally teaching you about system dynamics in a one-to-one lesson. If you are brand new to systems dynamics, this book will take you from your first steps right up to feeling confident in drawing causal loop diagrams, and even set you on the road to using modelling software to simulate your diagrams. If you are already familiar with systems dynamics but want to work on your causal loop diagramming skills, this book is also ideal. It works through example after example, all drawn from the real world, with some very topical examples for the UK (e.g. the railways system). The book is simultaneously simple and profound. I read it in just a few days, and enjoyed the experience as well as learned a lot from it. All in all, I would say that this is the best book on the market for learning about causal loops and system dynamics.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Packed with Knowledge!,
By
This review is from: Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking (Paperback)
This is an extraordinary, in the sense of out-of-the-ordinary, book. Flipping through it, you see page after page of loops and curves. At first, you might think it is a guide to drawing. And in a sense, it is. Most of the book explains how to use depictions of various types of loops to represent different kinds of business problems. Such problems never occur in isolation, because every business is a system, and everything that happens in a business has causes and effects that reach into other areas of the business and into the outside world. Author Dennis Sherwood is not peddling a simple notion, but rather is explaining “systems thinking,” a method of analyzing systems and processes. We unexpectedly found this quite entertaining, written with a light touch and bound to give almost any manager some new, valuable insights. On the down side, the author probably could have delivered his core message more succinctly, and after a while his insistence on demonstrating and categorizing the species and genera of loops begins to seem, well, a bit loopy.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential guide to using qualitative systems thinking,
By
This review is from: Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking (Paperback)
Dennis Sherwood has provided an excellent and sufficiently detailed guide to using causal loop diagrams as a tool of systems thinking. The book starts off with briefly introducing some systems thinking strands and main proponents and then delves into how one can construct and use causal loop diagrams (CLDs) to portray socio-economic systems.
What I found particularly useful about the book is that the topic is given sufficient attention - doing damage by making bad, or poorly thought out CLDs is relatively easy and that is what tends to happen, when the only contact one has with the methodology comes courtesy of a brief seminar or a brief skimming through Senge's The Fifth Discipline (where causal loops are used and introduced, but which often leads to readers trying to fit the world into the few archetypes presented). The book follows specific examples and works through them, with diagrams being developed progressively, with the associated explanations provided in the text. This also allows a reader, who is already relatively familiar with the concept, to use the diagrams on their own to progress through sections they feel comfortable with. In addition to devoting most effort to causal loop diagramming, the author also introduces System Dynamics modelling in the later chapters. For this field the book is far from comprehensive but it shows an interested reader what a possible next step is, something to probably be followed by Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM. There is also a chapter, where building blocks of how to introduce creative problem solving are discussed and although excellent, it too is more of an introduction, as it is a related area. The writing style is also pleasant - I imagine pretty much every reader should find it easy to follow. In essence, Sherwood does a good job of operationalising the concept of organisational linkages (and going beyond that) presented by Goodman in Missing Organizational Linkages: Tools for Cross-Level Research (Foundations for Organizational Science) and is an excellent addition to any systems thinking / theory library.
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