Author Description

We spend most of our lives as members of collections of people - families, corporations, churches, civic groups, gangs, book clubs, sports teams, ethnic groups, economic systems, nation states, to name a few. But, we have very little understanding of how these groups or systems work. We tend to see human systems as simply the collection of the people that make them up. When something goes wrong in a system, we see only the individual people so some person must be at fault - "You're not carrying your weight in the family," or "The director of manufacturing can't manage his people so product quality has deteriorated." Clearly, this way of seeing and interpreting events leads to finger-pointing, blame and polarization among the very people who need to be working together to solve the systemic problem. It also leads to paralysis and gridlock as we wait for those 'other' people who are causing our problems, to change. So we change wives, or we change the director of manufacturing, or we change president of the United States, but nothing really changes. This book helps the reader understand why and what to do about it.