Concept
Systems awareness
Systems awareness is the outer strand of Daniel Goleman's triple focus: deliberate attention to the wider webs a piece of work sits in, such as the organisation, the market, the supply chain and the environment, and to the slow, spread-out effects that no single meeting shows.
Goleman's starting point in Focus is a mismatch. Human perception developed to catch what is near, sudden and visible, a movement or a raised voice, and it is poor at registering what is slow, distributed and invisible, such as a market drifting over several years or an environmental cost spread along a product's life. Because we do not feel a system the way we feel a threat, it has to be looked for on purpose, with maps, data and questions. He links this to strategy through the organisational theorist James March's distinction between exploiting what already works, which needs narrow and steady attention, and exploring what might come next, which needs a wider scan; a leader has to move between the two. The idea overlaps with the older field of systems thinking and is an argument rather than a measured skill. The simplest test is to map one decision before taking it: who supplies it, who receives it, and what happens two steps away.
A real-life example
A logistics planner in Mersin is about to move all deliveries for a client to a cheaper night slot. She sketches who is affected two steps away and finds that the client's own customers, small pharmacies, cannot receive goods at night. She keeps one daytime route and saves most of the cost without losing the account.
How to use it
- 1Map one decision a week on a single page: inputs, outputs and who is affected two steps away.
- 2Name one slow trend in your sector and check monthly whether it has moved.
- 3Ask in planning whether a decision exploits what works or explores what is next, and whether the balance is right.