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hey leo here for actualised dot-org and in this episode I'm really excited to be introducing you to systems thinking [Music] you this is another one of those foundational episodes which you will only really be able to appreciate once you complete it and you get to see how powerful systems thinking is most people do not understand what this is and why it's so damn powerful so it's gonna take us a little bit of work to get into the juicy details but I promise you that this will be worth your time especially if you are on track with your life purpose and you want to that so what is systems thinking it's a way of looking at the world as a series of interconnected webs very nuanced very detail webs webs within webs within webs systems within systems within systems and all of these interacting with each other in interesting and counterintuitive ways so Systems thinking is about seeing the world from this sort of meta perspective stepping out of your personal perspective your own agenda or your clans little agenda and seeing the larger systems that constitute the functioning of our government of environments of economies of the whole globe and ultimately the entire cosmos living systems and also nonliving systems it's studying how systems work recognizing that there are certain laws and principles that govern systems and that these can be studied and learned through observation and through analysis and also through integrating a lot of stuff on in a holistic sort of way and it's also about studying the traps that befall us when we try to change and manipulate systems one of the most interesting things you'll learn in life is that when you manipulate a complex system it behaves in ways that you didn't expect and that it might create results that are opposite of what you intended and it really then is important to learn why that happens if you want to be successful at manipulating these systems and that's what systems thinking is really for it's for changing things that are larger than yourself so it's not just about how you become successful and how does your family become successful that you can probably accomplish without studying system thinking but if you want to understand and change how government works how corporations work how the environment functions and many other things like that then those are all things that are outside of you that are larger than you and then it's really important to learn systems thinking why is systems thinking so important well there's a variety of reasons I already mentioned that it's very difficult to change a system to get it to work the way that you want it to work unless you understand the nuances and the laws and the traps that are there so that's very important it's important for your life purpose if you found your life purpose if you've taken my life purpose course then that's something you're on track with but now the challenge you have after you found your life purpose is well how do I accomplish it how do I have that kind of big impact that I want to have in the world so that's one real reason why you would want to study systems thinking is because to make a meaningful positive impact in the world you're going to be changing some kind of system to do that so that's your life purpose is to have this kind of specific impact that you want to have but then how do you do that because you probably noticed that the system resists you trying to change it that's the challenge of fulfilling on your life purpose actualize in your life purpose that's not easy to do so if you want to be a leader a visionary a designer and architect an artist all of these people their lives and their careers are all about making a meaningful impact in the world they need to understand systems thinking really really well so this is perfect for you the other reason that you want to understand systems thinking is actually for your own benefit not just about changing the world but also for yourself because as I've talked about before it is a bit of a complex and geeky topic which is spiral dynamics I've introduced this model before spiral dynamics if you understand what that is I'm just going to give a very brief nutshell explanation of it here basically a guy by the name of Clare graves he studied how psyches evolved both individual psyches within human beings but also collective psyches organizations governments and so forth he studied this and he discovered that there are wrongs there are stages of evolution through which the psyche goes through and each rung is defined by a different set of values and a different perspective on the world so all these stages that you can move up through if you're growing if your self actualize you're gonna be moving up this this ladder and at every stage has a different way of seeing the world and so what's really important is for you to move up to stage yellow stage yellow is a pretty high stage in spiral dynamics model and that's all characterized by systems thinking so this is the first stage and I'm not gonna go into all the other stages you can see my other episodes on that but the stage yellow what is different about it is that it's for the first time aware of the fact that there are stages it's gotten to the point where it starts to see the world in terms of systems and so a lot of what I'm gonna be talking today is gonna be a very detailed characterization of what it's like to look at the world from a stage yellow perspective now if you're at the lower stages you might not find it immediately palatable you might not see the benefits of seeing the world this way well that just means you're gonna need to grow to it and what's spiral dynamics tells you is that there is a very linear path that one grows through as they evolve in their consciousness and their inner development and so if you want to grow to the highest stages with self-actualization then you're gonna have to evolve yourself to stage yellow you're probably not a stage yellow right now maybe you're able to just tap into it barely but the more you study systems thinking the more you start to see the world through stage yellow glasses then the more you're encouraging your psyche to to evolve up this up this hierarchy and that's a really important thing because stage yellow is the first stage that's really reflecting on itself and become self-aware and that becomes important because that allows you to avoid many of the disasters that befall you individually but also us collectively by not being able to self reflect and to see the world for the systems that are there so another reason is to avoid disaster humanity is on a certain brink right now and we're not sure what's going to happen with humanity just in the next fifty to a hundred years there are many disasters that are looming and many of these disasters are not personal private disasters they are collective disasters they are disasters that stemmed directly from failure to understand how the world is made up of systems and we're trying to manipulate these systems but we're doing it with our blinders on without understanding that what we're doing is we're trying to manipulate systems and so to just perpetuate the survival of the human race it might be important for us to all learn some systems thinking so let's get into this what is a system a system is a set of interconnected things so we can think of systems as elements these are oftentimes physical things and then the relationships are interconnections between these elements these relationships are usually much less tangible so it's harder for us to deal with them because they seem sort of abstract and yet these relationships are more important than the elements themselves so this is how we start to build a web right a web of built is built of things plus the connections that connect these things in a meaningful way a system also causes its own behavior systems often behave in very complex ways the more elements the more connections the more complicated the behavior a system also has purpose it serves a function and is very important to understand what the function is the function is an even more important aspect of the system beyond the elements and the relationships so as important as the relationships are in a system the purpose of the system is even more important because that determines the general behavior of what the system is doing and the most common purpose of systems is to protect themselves to maintain homeostasis and to expand themselves and to grow systems are highly ordered and yet at the same time they're also chaotic chaotic meaning that they're nonlinear and they're difficult to predict what's going to happen with them systems are self-organizing self-sustaining and self repairing and systems respond to outside forces in complex ways so if this is starting to resemble a life form or an organism then you're definitely on the right track organisms of course are very complex systems but there are a lot of other systems which are not just limited to biological flesh and blood and bone which are also really you can think of them as organisms a lot of corporations governments cities states collections of organisms like entire ecosystems you can think of all these things as sort of meta organisms and it's really not that important that these things are not made of flesh and bone and living cells in DNA you have to start to see from a larger perspective these systems exhibit very similar characteristics to a living cell or to a living creature in that when you poke it it'll run away or it will exhibit fear or anger or to lash out at you or it'll be defensive or I'll try to protect itself or it'll try to reproduce and so this opens us up to this whole possibility of these systems now evolving over time changing language for example can be a system you probably don't think of language as a living organism and yet languages are highly ordered highly structured purpose they have elements they have relationships they are also self organizing self sustaining self repairing and they also respond to outside forces and complex ways and they are also evolutionary language does not stand still just over a couple hundred years language shifts it changes we know that when we try to read some Shakespeare and we don't know what the hell he's talking about and Shakespeare that's only five hundred years old nothing in evolutionary time and yet think of how much the English language has evolved over the last five hundred years not to mention how language of the larger language of humanity has evolved the last two thousand years you see so this is where life gets really interesting as we start to analyze these systems in get get a sense of how they work and it's really remarkable because it's like your mind gets blown by just the complexity and the ingenious design of all these things and yet none of these things when you look at it were designed by somebody else sitting from outside it's not like some man was sitting there an invented language that's not how it happened it's more like man was the substrate within which language evolved by itself it's really self-organizing no one man invented language or even the Lingus language for that matter so that's what a system is now you're trying to get an idea and I'm going to give you a lot more examples as we keep going but what isn't a system is everything a system well not really not for our purposes scattered parts are not a system so just rocks lying around on the ground we're not going to consider that a system because they're not interconnected in any interesting meaningful way books on a bookshelf is that a system well not really even though the books might be ordered in alphabetical order it's not really a system because the books are not again in any kind of meaningful relationship with each other they're not interactive trash in a landfill is also not a system because it's just lying there it's sort of random and it's not really doing anything interesting now of course you could make an argument say well but the books and the trash in a landfill and the rocks these do constitute physical systems and that's true they in a certain level are physical systems and I'm sure there's interesting stuff to learn about a landfill and how it decomposes and all that kind of stuff but for our purposes we're interested in a more juicy systems so we're gonna consider just scattered parts to not be a system understanding though that of course at the highest level the entire cosmos is one giant system so nothing escapes the entire cosmos is scope and in that sense it's all just one thing but there's a lot of useful benefit we get from breaking it down into smaller systems just to see how they work and also to be able to manipulate them with our limited human minds it's not very useful to think of everything as just one system now let me give you some other examples of systems so that you get this really clear in your head so it's not just abstract a rainforest is a system the human body is a system an aquarium is a system and actually aquariums are really interesting if you ever owned a saltwater aquarium especially you know how complicated it is because you have all these different elements you have to test the acidity put various calcium and other supplements and minerals in there to make sure that your fish can thrive there has to be enough oxygen but not too much waste products from the fish so your fish and your plants and your corals and your substrate the sand all of it has to balance out there has to be circulation so this is a very complex system in a little box and if you get it wrong all your fish die or all your plants die or there's too much algae or whatever goes wrong so that's a really interesting little system that you can experiment with in your in your own home just to see how systems work of course a city or a country as a system a soccer team is a system a corporation any corporation big ones like Microsoft or little ones the economy as a whole or economies of individual countries currencies these are all systems a university is a system a car is a system the US military is a system public education is a system the Facebook platform is a system the Catholic Church is a system your business if you have a business or you're thinking of building a business that's a system and even if you are a one-man shop where it's just you and you're the owner and the the employee of the business and nobody else works for you that is still a system in fact that's what actualize that Rigas I'm basically a one-man shop I don't have any employees I do most of this stuff myself sometimes I hire a contractor here or there to help me but otherwise it's mostly just me and it's still a pretty complicated system actualize org if you think about all the stuff that goes into it it might seem simple it's like oh you're just a few videos but no there's a lot of website stuff there's a lot of back-end stuff backup systems computers servers hard drives there's a lot that goes into it behind the scenes that you don't see and all that constitutes a pretty complicated system the self of course is a system by which I mean you yourself and I don't just mean your physical body of course that's a system and your physical body has subsystems within it like the digestion system immune system cardiovascular system so forth but I mean you you're very psyche and who you most deeply feel that you are your ego your self-image all your memories all of that all your beliefs that is the self daddy is a system and then of course the entire cosmos as I've already said is the ultimate system and everything else could be considered a subsystem within the ultimate system so one thing you should immediately start to notice is that systems nest and this is what gives systems such complicated behaviors because you could have a system within a system within a system plus these systems can over lap in in complicated ways so what I want to do now is I want to I want to talk to you about the problems that we see within systems and this is really going to the heart of why we want to study systems is because some of these problems are really bad problems that we want to fix as human beings because it's just not pleasant to live with these problems what are these problems well these are persistent systemic problems that have existed for thousands of years in many cases and they're really difficult to stamp out and that's because it's not the individual humans that are the problem so much as the system is creating these problems so let's give you some examples poverty how long have people try to been an eradicate poverty forever right and it's still here with us that's because it's a persistent systemic problem the shrinking middle class that's a systemic problem that's not just a one isolated example every country around the world faces this prabhava shrinking middle class to various degrees and it's always been this way since the beginning of human civilizations thousands of years ago you know to various degrees various times in history this was less of a problem more of a problem and now like in America we're facing this problem more and more so this tells you that this is not a human individual human problem it's a systemic problem the environment global warming pollution toxicity the coral reefs dying the ice caps melting these are all systemic problems and these are not just new environmental problems have existed since since cities were first formed thousands of years ago it wasn't global warming back then but it was something else like you know led in your pipes or disease in your water supply drug addiction is a systemic problem and it's existed for thousands of years war also exists for thousands of years that's a systemic problem obesity crime lowbrow marketing have you noticed how difficult it is to market high consciousness things and yet it's so easy to market low consciousness things this is a huge problem that contributes to all the other problems we have small business funding getting funding for a small business idea that's a systemic province exist for thousands of years unemployment education fundamentalism terrorism corruption these are all systemic problems depression is a systemic problem with a depression epidemic in the Western world these days huge amounts of people are getting depressed why is that it's a systemic problem something in our system something in our society is creating it endangered species that's a systemic problem run away materialism that's created by our system partisan gridlock that's created by our system spam internet spam whatever kind of spam you get email spam spam in your mailbox physical mailbox also gets spammed with flyers and leaflets and coupons these are all systemic problems and these problems if you notice they're very difficult to solve we've been having spam now for 20 years since the beginning of the internet and there's more and more of it and no one seems to find a problem a solution to this problem so why is that well because there's a larger system at work which we're not understanding so I hope you can start to see the significance of working with systems because it allows you to address all of these problems that oftentimes we just like to sit back on our ass on our couch and say all that's stupid wore that stupid politician look at that corrupt person look at this crime look at the obesity epidemic look at the bad on him employment numbers look at the poverty look at all this stuff but it's not enough to just sit around on your couch and point fingers you got to say okay what are we not understanding about these problems where are they coming from what's creating them what are the forces that work there and then when you do that now you start to really have a chance to change something for the better so what I want to do now is I want to now go into the bulk of this episode and talk about the principles that defines systemic thinking so if you think along these lines along these values then you will be a systemic thinker and if you don't then you won't be so firstly we have to recognize that problems are systemic and not personal this is a very important principle this means it's not some Hitler or Osama bin Laden that's creating problems it's not one or two or a thousand evil people that are creating problems in the world it's systems it's poorly designed systems that are creating these problems so one thing this means is that to be a systemic thinker you have to stop casting blame at other people you have to stop calling things evil and start to ask yourself the question okay why what is the larger meta operating principle here that's creating this we have a drug epidemic okay it's not because the drug users are evil people it's because of the environment it's because of the bad education it's because of the easy availability of drugs because of pharmaceutical companies or whatever right it's because the media is serving up such low consciousness entertainment that people have nothing hired to aspire higher to aspire to so they just have nothing to do better than just to go do drugs you see it's a combination of all these factors and I'm just you know I'm just scratching the surface of that one issue it's a very complicated issue so sister thinkers start to see that all of these issues are a lot more complicated than they think then we think when we start to look at them whether it's health care the economy taxes drug problems environmental problems these are much larger than we assumed another principle of systems thinking is seeing everything as a system now of course not everything deserves to be thought of as a system but hey a lot of stuff we're talking about here is highly systemic so it's good if you're starting to move into stage yellow spiral dynamics to start to put on this sort of lens of like that's a system and that's a system and that's this it's like you're walking down the street and you start to see everything in systems and that can be a phase that you go through you don't ultimately want to be doing that for the rest of your life that's a good phase to go through for now another principle of systems is non-linearity non-linearity opens us up to chaos theory that's a very complicated topic that I also a beautiful topic I wish I had time to go into it right now but I don't maybe in a future episode but when non-linearity means is that the really interesting stuff in life it's not a simple equation like you saw in algebra class that had one or two variables it has hundreds if not thousands of variables and all these variables affect each other and what this means in practice is that playing the game changes the rules of the game so a nonlinear system would be something I mean a linear system would be something like monopoly you're just playing monopoly we know what the rules are when we begin the game that's linear that's easy we can deal with that what's trickier is if we create a monopoly game where one of the rules of the game is that halfway through the game we can change all the rules you see this is tricky because now your strategy can't rely on the rules staying fixed the rules will change and you have to take that into account and that means a whole lot of unpredictability that means that your system can take dramatic twists and turns and do 180 degree reversals and that can surprise you and this leads us to the other point which is very important to understand about systems is that they're very counterintuitive they don't work in a simplistic sort of like I will pull this lever here and the stock price will go up or I will do this thing here and poverty will go down it doesn't work that way there are many many factors affecting when poverty goes up well when drug abuse goes down win war increases when the education system improves right there's many many complicated factors and a lot of times when naive people people who do not understand system thinking go into a system and start to muck around with it they don't understand and appreciate the complexities of these systems and so they just think like oh yeah I'm just gonna go in there and pull that lever and I'm just gonna get the result that I want but oftentimes what happens you pull that lever and you get the opposite result of what you wanted and then of course you're stuck suffering the consequences so that's a very good reason to study systems so you don't suffer the consequences of naive counter intuitive thinking non linearity means unpredictability and chaos chaos does MIT not mean anarchy in the sense that anything goes a chaotic system like for example the weather is not random it doesn't just do whatever it wants it follows physical laws and rules but it's nonlinear which means that you can't predict out too far into the future and it can always surprise you which is why weather cannot be predicted more than about 10 days into the future because any predictions further out than 10 days they become meaningless because the weather can change so quickly you see but we can still predict the weather reasonably well just as long as we understand the limits of our predictions that's what chaos means non-linearity also means that just because you have good intentions when you try to go in there and change a system does not mean really anything and really the people with good intentions who are simple-minded try to go in there and change systems and what happens we get the opposite effect these people create evil rather than good that's why a lot of good people create evil and we've seen that throughout all of history because the problem was that they assumed that all my good intentions are enough no you also have to understand what the hell you're doing and that means you have to study these systems and really understand how they work it's a science it's not anything goes another principle of systems thinking is that local actions have global impact we can no longer just worry about our own little sphere here like if I have my company all I care about is my company and my profits and my bank account and my employees and that's it we can't think that way when we're doing systems thinking because we have to understand that my company is just one element within a larger system the global economy or the national economy or the industry that my company is a part of and so what my company does doesn't just affect my company in my pocketbook it affects my industry it affects my country it affects the citizens all over the world it affects employment rates it affects taxes it affects currencies right it affects public opinion so all these things need to be taken into account if you're gonna run a successful company because if all you do is you build a local little company that only cares about itself guess what you're gonna fail you might succeed in the short term but in the long run you're gonna fail because the world is becoming more and more global and big companies now have to worry learn more about their global impact you can't just say [ __ ] the world and I'm gonna do whatever I want because you're gonna have a a backlash of public opinion against you see people will boycott you if you behave that way so you have to start to think more globally not just with companies but with everything you have to see how you or whatever you're doing fits into the larger systems that it's a part of this requires broadening your scope other principle systems thinking is becoming conscious of backfiring mechanisms this is going along with that point about countering two of his a lot of times what happens is that you change something in a system and it backfires on you and you as a systems thinker quickly learn that the system is its own greatest enemy what is the greatest enemy to the United States it's not the middle-east it's not North Korea it's not even Russia and it's certainly not terrorists it's ourselves and see in fact terrorists know that which is why terrorists use this strategy and the only way that terrorism works is if it gets the other person to react in a knee-jerk unconscious fashion in such a way that that reaction backfires and destroys a system from within see the terrorists understand that terrorists are not going to be able to compete with the US military face to face ever nor are they ever going to bring down the United States by killing all of its population or even 1% of its population it's never gonna happen but what they can do is they can make strategic little attacks here and there get people afraid and then that fear will lead to a collapse of the United States by making bad choices based on that fear and that anger which the terrorism has incited you see so we have to become very conscious of this and this issue of terrorism for example is one systemic problem which is very counterintuitive a lot of simple-minded people think that oh well we'll just bomb the [ __ ] out of the terrorists that's gonna solve everything but no this ends up backfiring because when you do that of course you kill innocent innocent civilians when you kill innocent civilians of course that makes it easier for the terrorists to recruit more people to their side and then of course the more that happens your problem gets worse and worse rather than better so you need counterintuitive solutions to fix some of these counterintuitive problems starting to ring some bells that's just terrorism there's a lot of stuff like this this applies to everything from education to how your company is run to marketing to economies to taxation to health care so many things as systems thinkers we learn that we are our own greatest enemies I hope actualize that org has shown you that at least for yourself personally that you are your own greatest enemy and I hope that you're getting a direct hit of that as you're doing personal development work the more you do it the more you'll see that man he wasn't kidding who I really am my own worst enemy but of course not just individually but also collectively the United States is its own worst enemy we create all our own problems nobody else is creating the problems it's very important to start to understand that because otherwise we're gonna be stuck pointing our fingers outside of where the problems are all the problems are really internal problems systems-thinking also means that there are no easy brute-force solutions it's understanding that violent disruptive change to a complex system is gonna create disaster it's not going to fix it you have to be very careful about overreacting to systemic problems because systems are all about balance and harmony and when you don't understand that systems are about balance and harmony maintaining a certain opposition of positive and negative forces a system relies on both of these then you start to run into some of the problems that we're starting to see politically for example right now in the United States the American populace thought that hey what we're going to do is we're going to elect Trump and Trump is going to be a disruption to the broken political system because you know politics filled with gridlock a bunch of political insiders so we're gonna send in a guy who is completely inexperienced with politics and with government and he will just magically somehow create the change we want you know turn the system around but see it's not turning out that way and it's very obvious that it can't work that way because the United States government is a very complicated system you can't just throw a grenade into a china shop and then expect a good result at the end you're gonna get chaos not the kind of chaos I was talking about for here you you're gonna get disrupted destruction and you're gonna get overreaction and you're getting a lot of backfiring which is exactly what Trump is encountering and that was very predictable to a systems thinker it was obvious because Trump is the antithesis of a systems thinker he does not honor any of the principles that I'm talking about here today in this episode none he breaks them all which is why he's going to be a failure in a disaster because it's simply not gonna work can you imagine going to a surgeon because you have a tumor in your head and you go to a brain surgeon and this guy takes the same kind of simplistic violent disruptive approach to your body that Trump is taking to the government what's gonna happen can you just take a scalpel and start to poke around randomly in your head no that's gonna be disastrous you have to know what you're doing because you're you're sticking your knife into an extremely complicated system maybe the most complex system we know of on on the planet inside your skull you know your brain it's so complicated in there you have to know what you're doing you have to study that thing you have to be very careful because every incision you make could end up making the situation worse and not better another important principle of systems thinking is intuition and holism versus reductionism this is a problem that we've seen in the sciences we've also seen this problem in the universities where a lot of scientifically minded logical rational people like to overanalyze everything and like to reduce everything down to physics when you do this what you're doing is you're taking a very complicated system in your you're only focusing on the materialistic gross elements and you're ignoring all the interesting relationships which really define the behavior of that system holism means that you see the thing as a whole and not just a bunch of parts for example if I take a human brain and stick it into a blender blend it up and then analyze the little molecules that are there in that brain soup with a microscope I'll be able to see you know various molecules and cells and stuff blood cells and neurons and neurotransmitters but that is not going to tell me anything about the functioning of the brain or about consciousness or about emotions or about all the other interesting stuff that the brain does to really understand the brain you have to look at it holistically how it actually works you have to look at the relationships between all those elements that's where the magic is but reductionists a lot of them like to reduce stuff down like oh well yeah the brain is just a bunch of neurons and the neurons are they're just a bunch of atoms and atoms are just a bunch of quarks so everything is just a bunch of quarks but then you lose something when you do that you lose a lot this is a danger of reductionism as systems thinkers we have to recognize that reductionism is not going to fly for fixing many of these world's high-level problems you see you can't just apply reductionism to something like poverty or to terrorism or - yeah environmental problems you have to see these things holistically another principle of systems thinking is being aware of false boundaries it's recognizing that in reality there are no fixed boundaries in the universe boundaries are subjective things we as human beings get to say where we draw which boundaries to different human beings could look at a group of ducks one of them could say well that's one group of ducks another one could say no that's ten individual ducks which is true both depending on how you look at it see you are deciding where to draw the boundaries and simplistic thinkers who are not at stage yellow sorrel dynamics they tend to think that no there's ten ducks there that's objective or it's like no that's one group of ducks that's objective these boundaries are somehow defined within physics but that's not the case at all systems thinkers understand that we get to define what the subsystem is that we're looking at within the entire cosmos we get to draw the boundaries and as systems thinkers we understand this is a very important power because how we draw the boundary determines what we're gonna see and then what potential solutions we might come up with so just by redrawing the boundaries could give us the solution that we weren't seeing before because we were drawing our boundary too narrowly or too rigidly or it was too big or it was too small so one of the powers we have systemic thinkers is to go into a situation say oK we've been looking at the situation like this but what if we redraw the boundaries so that we look at it like this ah dad gives us a better perspective now we get to see the true root problem and then we can come up with a decent solution another principle of systems thinking is that the world is dynamic rather than static simple-minded people think of the world as static objects it's like yeah there's my car my house my country my language my body my my beliefs these are all static too naive person to a systems thinker they understand all of this stuff is constantly morphing and evolving my body is evolving my car is devolving it's deteriorating every single day right I mean this is true your car is changing every single day the tires are getting worn out the engine is getting worn out the oil is getting dirty as you drive it it the car itself is becoming dirty as you drive it your government is changing all the time your country is changing it's growing more citizens are being added the world as a whole is changing and evolving your job your marketplace your entire industry is changing and evolving certain industries are dying coal jobs are are out the window and they're never coming back see so all this stuff has to be taken into account because otherwise you have a fixed static mindset in a dynamic complicated world and that that just doesn't work it's not reflecting reality even your language is changing every single year these dictionaries like merriam-webster they they publish new words new English words are invented every single year your beliefs are changing your ideologies even your religion if you think that well the one thing I got is I got my religion my good old Christianity well guess what you know how much Christianity has evolved over the last two thousand years it's virtually unrecognizable if you actually study the evolution of Christianity it's very funny that a lot of modern Christians don't believe in evolution and yet Christianity itself their form of it has evolved to what it is today just even in the last hundred years it's evolved so much totally different another important principle of systems thinking is complexity nuance valuing wisdom and learning so systems thinkers actually value complexity they don't try to oversimplify everything they value nuance not everything is black and white they value wisdom and they value lifelong learning because they understand that all these systems are so complex that you need to be learning them all the time otherwise you're gonna get stuck systems thinkers also understand that the power in working with systems is not in manipulating them directly but in understanding them you have to really understand the system and that's where your solution lies you don't just jump in there and start taking action without knowing what you're doing this goes back to our point about sticking a scalpel into your brain right you don't do that you gotta understand the brain so a systems thinker will invest a lot of time just in understanding now what this does is it makes the system's thinker look like a space cadet or an academic in the eyes of people who are at the lower tiers of the spiral dynamics model so stage orange stage green stage yellow when I mean yeah stage orange and green and also stage blue yellow is systems thinking so blue orange and green when they look at yellow they look at yellow and say man why are you so obsessed with theory you're very much stuck in your head as a systems thinker it seems just like armchair philosophy that's what those stages will think of stage yellow but that's just because they haven't evolved yet to the point of seeing the whole world as systems and when they do they'll say ho my god I need to learn so much more there's so much I don't understand yet and then they'll get to work crack and open the books learning all this stuff and try to understand it another principle of systems thinking is taking preventative action rather than fixing problems once they arise it's being forward-looking it's having a long time horizon it's not just about next quarters profits it's about sustaining the company to grow and thrive in changing market places 10 20 years down the line it's that kind of thinking it's not just going to the doctor so that he can give you heart surgery because you spent the last 20 years eating terrible food it's about taking preventative action it's becoming conscious of when your body isn't looking good isn't feeling good and fixing it 20 years before you get to that heart attack situation it's expecting unforeseen consequences of your actions it's understanding that hey when I'm eating this cheeseburger when I'm putting this french fries and this mayonnaise into my mouth that has much larger consequences than just feeding my hunger or giving me some emotional boost or titillating my tastebuds right because the systemic thinker sees this from a holistic perspective this is gonna affect how much energy I have with my children this is gonna affect how long I live it's gonna expect how much money I spend on health insurance this is gonna affect my mood whether I'm depressed or happy this is gonna affect my sex life this can affect my confidence myself it's gonna affect so much stuff and that's just me not to mention the fact that hey you know if I'm fat or if I have a heart attack and I'm a CEO of a big company that's gonna affect not just me not just my family but every single one of my employees my entire company could suffer from that and all of the family members of all my employees all their children will suffer from that the entire industry that I mean will suffer from that you see so you start to see this kind of ripple effect of all your actions and then you become very humble and you become very careful because you realize that every little thing that you touch could be a huge thing so here what comes with that understanding is admitting the unknown system thinkers are humble in this respect because they see that these systems dwarf them they dwarf your understanding so much that you have to be humble you have to say damn I don't know I don't know how healthcare works I don't know how government I don't really know how terrorism works whereas simple-minded people when they see a complex system they assume hey it's easy I know exactly how I know exactly what the solution should be those stupid people in government they're so stupid we can fix healthcare in a week that's what Trump thought Trump thought that he can just go in there and hey healthcare is a breeze that's because he has no systemic understanding of anything which is why he's gonna be a failure no matter how much he tries he will be a failure because he's bringing a very simple-minded understanding of the world to places in the world like the US government which are extremely complex and nuanced and very systemic and he's gonna be very frustrated there because every move he takes is gonna backfire on him you just watch watch what happens it's only gonna get worse before it gets better this also means self-reflection another thing that Trump lacks self-reflection systems thinkers need to self-reflect because hey for a system to be able to function and this is kind of where the element of consciousness or awareness comes into play you know I say in a lot of my past episode I say that awareness is the solution consciousness raise your consciousness that will solve many of your problems why is it the case because like we said before a systems thinker understands the system creates all of its own major problems so how can you solve your own problems when you can't reflect inside yourself to see what your own structural problems are you see and this of course for Trump is a problem not just collectively as he's running the government it's also gonna be a problem well it has been a problem personally in his own life in his own development you can see the man has no self reflection which of course reflects in how he govern how he interacts with people and why all that stuff is disastrous why it's disastrous in business it's disastrous and government is disastrous in your marriage it's as Astra's in your personal life it's disastrous with your health all across the board without self-reflection you're going to die every system that is not sufficiently self reflective is a dodo bird it is not going to be able to compete self-reflection wins out self-reflection higher consciousness is what evolution is pushing towards so it's it's not going to work it can work in the short-term but it will never work in a long-term another principle of systems thinking is looking for the root causes of issues rather than the superficial aspects a lot of people get caught up in the flashy and emotional superficial aspects where as systems thinkers can see through that they don't get caught by the red herrings so another great example this is with terrorism a new election comes around and what happens the Republicans pull out the old red herring all the terrorists are coming to kill us and blow us up in all this and look at the bomb attack last week in the news and that other bomb attack and 20 people were killed 50 be a hundred people can look at this and look at the terrorists they're recruiting and I'll see this is all an emotional herring yeah it might be true that there was a bad bomb attack and that's a very sad thing but also you have to understand as a systems thinker that these are the superficial aspects this is the fear this is the emotional stuff a system thing you have to say wait a minute but what are the root causes what actually causes terrorism let's take a look at that and so it's all that's in Salaam that sir stays long we got to get rid of Islam no that's not it it's not that superficial it goes a lot deeper than just Islam now I don't want to get into that that's a politically charged topic that I really don't wanna get into here I just want to start to point out to you that notice how in the public when it comes to climate when it comes to corporations when it comes to tax policy when it comes to all the governmental policies every single one of them that they are all mired in these red herrings of emotional superficial aspects and that's all pretty much what happened in the u.s. 2016 election we didn't talk about the real issues of anything nothing not the real issues of climate change not the real issues of the economy and the shrinking Middle's of these things the real issues were not addressed only superficial stuff little soundbites and that's done largely so that nothing can be changed that's actually how our politics works that's one of the systemic problems of our political system is that we talk about the superficial stuff and we just trigger people's low consciousness emotions push their anger and fear buttons and their outrage buttons and their ideological but we push all those buttons so they don't really think very critically and systemically about these issues because there are larger corporate and political interests at play which are vying for power and they do not want average people to to know anything about that just worry about the superficial stuff worry about your terrorists while we robbed the country blind and take all the power for ourselves you see this is a classic game that has been played for since the beginning of civilization this is not unique to a 21st century American government this is this has gone on since the days of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and everything up till now it's been this game say you distract the simple-minded people with red herrings and then nothing changes and the status quo gets maintained and that's how the larger system maintains homeostasis that's good for the larger system but it's not good for for progress and evolution another important principle of systems thinking is concern for balance I've already touched on this but systems thinkers really appreciate the yin-yang ass fact of life they see that even things that look like evil forces are not just evil forces that systems often have many opposing forces and that the greatest danger to a system is actually eliminating all the opposing forces until you only have one force when you only have one force without anything holding it back nothing to [ __ ] its growth then you have an explosion of infinite growth an explosion of infant and a growth another way we can think of that is a cancer you have a cancer and in a sense that's what Humanity is becoming now on this earth is we're becoming a cancer that's growing too fast for our own good and we might annihilate ourselves just because we fail to understand that we need to balance all these things we need a balanced population growth we need to balance corporate greed we need to balance the power that wealthy people have in society if you don't do these things the thing will collapse and self implode and this sort of appreciation of balance also leads to an appreciation of the nature of wisdom or I mean the I said the back words the wisdom of nature because again simple-minded people don't appreciate nature very much more nuanced people start to see that nature's natural systems the systems of nature like rainforests coral reefs water aquifers even to a certain extent like tribal populations that there's a certain natural wisdom that's there that a lot of times when we build an egoic Western civilization the ego discounts some of this natural wisdom for example with a good example this is pharmaceutical drugs right we make all these synthetic drugs not appreciating the natural herbs and supplements and medicines that are available in indigenous cultures all around the world we don't care about those we care about manufacturing these synthetic drugs that we can patent and then we give these antidepressants to people by the millions and then they get hooked on these antidepressants or on these opiates if they're powerful synthetic opiates and then that just makes her their depression and their anxiety and all that stuff even worse because now they got an addiction on top of that see that's a failure to appreciate the wisdom of nature and this happens in many ways so it's not just about the environment of course that's important but it's appreciating the delicate balances within ecosystems with endangered animals with fish populations in the ocean you know so that we can sustain and feed ourselves on fish and not out fish the whole ocean so they're all these different um elements come into play there another important principle systems-thinking is having a global concern rather than a local tribal concern simple minded people are tribalistic and systems thinking is anti tribal because it's integrative it integrates the whole thing global concern for the entire species we don't make distinctions between people we see all people is basically the same and not just people but even animals and even the environment we start to see that all of this is important we can't just say that people are the only important thing on the planet and we certainly can't say well only America or only Germany or only a certain race of people is the only important one so you can't do that because we've seen throughout history that when you do that you ignore the larger dynamics that are going on and it's ultimately unsustainable that's why slavery wasn't sustainable maybe it was a good idea for the white people in the south but it wasn't sustainable could not be morally sustained they were conquered in the war for that reason it was morally unsustainable and they were not appreciating that see they didn't think about now we didn't think about like oh oh yeah we can have these slaves but what's gonna happen when people are outraged by the cruelty that we inflict on these slaves I mean maybe we're cool with it but maybe we're gonna get out competed and ultimately destroyed in war because of this cruelty that we're inflicting see that would be systemic thinking but of course slave owners weren't very good systemic thinkers see they were try ballistic systems thinking is all about seeing situations as democratic and egalitarian and as humanistically as we can because we recognize that anything other than that is not sustainable you cannot run a sustainable dictatorship these days on the planet it's not gonna last for more than 100 years what also comes along with this is the principle that materialism is not the only game in town and in fact success is not the only goal and it's not even the most important goal never-ending growth is not what humanity is about because if it is then we're just a cancer growth at all costs is just a cancer and the cancer ultimately kills itself so systems thinkers need to understand this they understand that there are there's a much bigger game being played here in life than just growth or just success or just raising our gross national product or just everyone having a house in a car there's much more to the game of life than that they also need to understand when enough is enough and just ever-increasing velocity is not what we're doing here in life that's not what humanity is about a system thinker is very concerned about sustainability every system that he or she looks at they always ask themselves is this sustainable is this dictatorship sustainable is the war on drugs sustainable is our deficit sustainable are these tax rates sustainable is this business model sustainable is my marriage sustainable are the lies that I'm telling myself about my personal development are they sustainable when you look at that and a lot of situations you'll be shocked to discover that wow it's not sustainable at all I can clearly see how if this continues we're gonna go crashing right into the ground and then you can start to ask yourself well how do we make it sustainable how do we can we engineer the various elements relationships and forces of this complicated system how do we redraw the boundaries how do we widen our scope how do we see this thing from some new perspective how do we raise our awareness so that sustainability then becomes part of the system notice that some systems are sustainable and others are not so what's the difference there well that's something worth studying another principle systems thinking is recognizing the dangers of self-interest people generally that are stages below stage yellow in the spiral dynamics they're not very good at seeing the dangers of self-interest they are mostly serving their self-interest blindly without self reflection of course you see this with Trump very clearly but you also see it collectively to see don't make the mistake of me picking on Trump as though Trump is a bad person he's just a very good example that we have right now in and in the public mindset that we can draw attention to but you also have to wonder Trump where do you come from did he create himself or is he the product of a system what is the system that created Trump ah interesting see a systems thinker is not blaming Trump for being Trump a systems thinker is asking the bigger meta question of like what created Trump how many other people are there out there who are like Trump that you never even see that are behind the scenes running all sorts of corporations businesses governments you name it kind of a scary thought huh how many of those people there might be because you understand that Trump is just a product of a system he's a victim as much as anybody because what where to come from well is a sort of materialistic stage orange success oriented mindset that he has and this has been indoctrinated into him through his upbringing through his family history through the place he grew up in I guess that was New York or wherever he got his chops right the kind of business environment that he was in so somehow he learned how to run business in the sort of ruthless fashion this non self reflective manner growth at all costs see so that was a product of our culture and American culture right now is suffering and suffocating because of this because look at Wall Street look at these giant corporations who are just lining their pockets with money like Apple Microsoft Facebook Google these corporations are gonna become a huge problem for us in the future we think that these are just innocent corporations right now Google might seem like a good corporation but what happens in 50 or a hundred years when the founders are dead long dead and you have a manager running Google for maximizing profit oh boy you better watch out that's gonna that could create a global catastrophe right there because these companies like Apple Google Facebook Microsoft they have so much money so much power if they really wanted to use it they could do some real damage so system sinkers understand that self-interest whether its corporate self-interest or government self-interest or religious self-interest that this is ultimately tribalism and tribalism is not going to work in the larger system of the entire planet this means recognizing problems like the tragedy of the Commons I'll talk about that in the future studying things like arms races why do we have arms races and arms races of course are not just nuclear arms races but there are arms races that happen with corporations with lawsuits patent lawsuits these days between giant corporations are an arms race in and of themselves political arms races so starting to study all these becomes important and generally you start to come to the conclusion as a systems thinker that hey we need to include everyone into our solutions because if we exclude somebody those people get pissed off they're gonna rock the boat and ultimately they're gonna dis stabilize and break our system so it's not really a solution unless it includes everyone also it means being conscious of systemic addictions addictions are not just personal things but they're also collective things a nation could be addicted to oil could be addicted to low taxes could be addicted to subsidies could be addicted to growth and these are all very serious addictions that we face today with our government and with many of our corporations and these need to be addressed and we need to see that these addictions are not just because the company is evil we have to look at the larger environment how do we change the larger environment so the companies are not so damn evil and so selfish and so money hungry and so growth oriented that there are virtually cancerous how do we change the rules so that doesn't happen systems thinkers think about how to think it's like meta thinking it's self-reflection systems thinkers also recognize that changing paradigms is a huge leverage point for changing systems many times the biggest problem that is keeping a bad system in place is a bad paradigm and these paradigms are intangible things it's sort of like a framework or a set of beliefs that you look at the world or like a lens that you look at the world through right most people completely disregard the power of their beliefs their ideologies and their paradigms they think this stuff is just like odds it's just some mind stuff you know mind stuff's not important what's important is money what's important as military power what's important as oil what's important is killing terrorists you know that they think of it in this very kind of gross way whereas actually a systems thinker understands that shifting one's perspective is highly significant it's not armchair philosophy it's not just something for academics and colleges by shifting our perspective we can see the problem in a way that there is a solution some things when you're looking at them from some paradigm or completely unsolvable for example the mind-body problem a lot of scientists are wasting their [ __ ] time right now in universities arguing over the mind-body problem and philosophers as well and they've done this for hundreds of years they've argued about the mind-body problem they don't understand that their whole paradigm is backwards you're never gonna solve the mind-body problem through a naive realist paradigm it's never gonna work on the other hand you shift your paradigm you realize that everything is consciousness and that the brain is not creating consciousness but that consciousness is the location of the brain when you realize that the whole problem is solved it's amazing but see that takes a paradigm shift and making those paradigm shifts are the hardest things because it means you have to change you're one with beliefs which of course most people don't want to touch systems-thinking also means integrating multiple perspectives you go out of your way to survey many perspectives and then you integrate and bring them all together because you realize that every perspective has a tinge of truth to it this doesn't mean all perspectives are equal some can be very misguided but even the super misguided ones go study Nazis and you will find a tinge of truth in some of their perspectives see a simple-minded person saw Nazis a can there's nothing for me to learn from Nazis there's nothing for me to learn from terrorists there's nothing for me to learn from from a pedophile there's nothing for me to learn from this from that I'm gonna only study the good stuff the stuff that agrees with me that's a very simple-minded way of looking at the world what I do is I gather all the perspectives I try to see the truth there bring it all together understanding that there is no one true perspective also this means that as you're integrating multiple perspectives when you're coming up with your solution you have to accommodate the values of various people that are out there you can't just be serving your own private values because you're not the only thing around in the world and other things out there that are out there they will object people things government's corporations animals they will object to your values see you have to find common ground there and you have to be very open-minded as you're studying these multiple perspectives because a systems thinker knows that some of these perspectives are nasty ugly horrible on the surface or they seem false there's no way this perspective could be true and I can't see how it could be true but a system seek to understand is that hey I can't know what I don't know I have to be open enough to do an honest investigation and only then will I know where as simple-minded non-systemic thinkers they assume they already know which perspectives are good or bad before they've actually adopted them and tried them on for themselves and of course leads to a huge blind spots another principle of systems thinking is studying patterns and cycles you recognize that many of these systems are cyclical they oscillate they grow through they go through the you know noticeable phases and studying these phases and patterns becomes important business patterns government patterns ideological patterns even patterns in your own life you know your own life goes through cycles it can be useful to study the cycles of a human beings life because then you know what's anticipate this is true science you're studying how these systems work in reality not how you think they work but how they really work empirically it also means studying systems versus manipulating them so if you get eager to go manipulate a system I encourage you to pause and really think about it I think a good long while before you manipulate anything because it might easily backfire on you it also means studying feedback loops because you're gonna see as a systems thinker that a lot of the systemic problems are caused by poor feedback loops where feedback is not clear or it's too long delayed there's not a quick enough feedback so the people in your corporation aren't getting the feedback quickly enough to fix the problems that are there that could be fixed if you just fix the feedback loop or the wrong kind of feedback is being given so that's in a nutshell what systems thinking is you got a pretty good idea it's still only an introduction we're still just skimming the surface but you can see how deep of a field this is you could spend here studying this stuff and I think you should if you're interested in changing the world for the better how do you know if you're a systems thinker next time you're sitting in traffic big old traffic jam and you're pissed off rather than being pissed off and blaming the guy in front of you for the traffic jam you wonder to yourself why is there this traffic in the first place what is the systemic problem causing this traffic is it the number of lanes is it the speed limit that's posted there on the side that I saw is it too slow is it the stoplight maybe there's too many stoplights too many intersections maybe there's not a highway nearby or vice versa maybe there's too many highways in this area and the way that they're converging is causing this bottleneck see when you start to think of every mundane problem in the world in that fashion that's when you know you've really become a systems thinker and now you're at stage yellow this is how stage yellow thinks they see the whole world like this and this gives them a certain tranquility because they're no longer going around blaming people there are actually much more pragmatic their solutions oriented they're interested in understanding the actual problem rather than the superficial pointing my finger at somebody now you might say leo this is all well and good but you know why should I care about changing the world I'm just interested in improving myself I want to get my little family I got I want to get my little business going and earn some good money and that's all that I really care about who cares about changing that we were talking about these big things government taxes terror is like I'm not gonna change any of this stuff well look then what you're admitting here is that you're admitting that you're a useless human being that's what you're admitting understand this because you're saying that all you care about is your personal pleasure and satisfaction and your own personal private success and you're not tying that success or pleasure to anything of value that you're contributing to the world you're expecting that stuff to just kind of be given to you because you go in there and you work for eight hours a day but your work is not directly tied to actually improving the world what that means that you will be eliminated you will go extinct you like the dodo bird it's only a matter of time you understand this your ability in the future to get paid to make a good living will be directly proportional to how creative you are as a systems thinker and the kind of challenges that you're out there solving for the world if your work is not solving meaningful world problems you will get eliminated you will not be successful you will be miserable and you will be wandering just like those coal miners hey where are my coal jobs I need my coal job back because you're just expecting somebody to provide you with employment and you're not thinking about hey hey this thing I'm doing by digging a [ __ ] coal I'm destroying the environment yeah it's good for me and my family but there's seven billion other people around who don't want to be breathing coal and there's solar companies and wind companies and all this innovation happening all around you but you're I just want my call I just want to make call and bring home a paycheck well you know what [ __ ] you because you're a selfish bastard that's what you are you're not thinking ahead you're not being creative and so therefore you are being eliminated I'm sorry to say that that's what's real and that's not just gonna happen with coal that's gonna happen with everything we're living in a society where change is accelerating every single [ __ ] year change is accelerating you need to be on your toes you need to be learning educating yourself you'd be on the cutting edge or you will go extinct that's what's gonna happen and before you go extinct you will be very miserable extinction does not just mean your physical death you will be miserable in many other ways you're not gonna have the satisfaction of contributing meaningfully to humanity that's an enormous satisfaction I at every single day it's a huge component of my happiness in my life you're not gonna have that you're foolish if you're turning that down see not to mention that you're contributing to many of the world's greatest problems and that you might directly lead to the destruction of the human race that's what might happen when you blindly go about working for somebody what's most likely gonna happen is that you're gonna be working for a cancerous corporation which is contributing to a cancerous society which will ultimately lead to a cancerous end to this little experiment of life that we are part of so start thinking of bigger challenges than yourself this is counterintuitive you think that thinking about yourself is gonna get you everything you want and actually it's the exact opposite thinking about the world and virtually paying no attention to yourself is what's gonna really grow you the most and give you the most fulfillment and satisfaction in life so be careful about your intuitions here understand that the world is at a precipice we're in a dangerous place and in a sense it could be a bad thing or it could be a great thing because we have a great opportunity for redemption the world needs you to help fix some of these very big and important challenges that we have these systemic thinking challenges and to do that you need to turn inside yourself and make yourself a systems thinker that's it I'm out of here please click the like button for me and come check out actualized right here my website I have resources there my life purpose course my book list and the forum my blog and many other things wait one second before you go about my book list on my book list I recently added two incredibly important books for system's thinking they're all about systems thinking so if you have the book let's go check those out buy them read them they're very important it'll build on everything I talked about here and if you don't have the book list then I recommend you check it out because I think you'll get more than its cost in value just from reading these two books about systems thinking not to mention all the other amazing books that are there alright that's it stick with me for more in future you