Applying Systems Thinking

I somehow ended up with four dogs, two of them, 130 pound Bernese Mountain
Dogs, and two obsessive compulsive Australian Cattle Dogs.

Feeding has always been a tedious, time consuming, mess generating chore, and as
a systems thinker, I needed to break down the processes while also taking multiple
factors into account, in order to really look at this every day problem as a system.

There was a few things I observed, the first was that the big dogs would bully the
little dogs, and that would cause the little dogs to get less food, and then they
would beg for more food throughout the day. The second is that I wasted a
tremendous amount of time walking around getting the bowls, the water, the scoop,
the food, which were all in different places in the kitchen. The other thing I noticed
is that Berners have really large noses, and we had relatively small bowls, so they
would push the bowls across the floor as they were feeding, in order to get at the
food. This also created a mess, and a metal on tile screeching during the feeding
process, as their large noses pushed the bowls around the floor. In addition, the
bowls weren't stackable, so we had four water bowls and four food bowls, and I
would have to carry them around as I was trying to get them ready for the feeding.

I had to fix this problem, and to improve this, I thought of a few things. One, move
the food bin to a better location and tie a scoop to it. Two purchase eight large,
stackable bowls with sticky grip bottoms. And three, devise an order of operations
and placement of the bowls that decreased the infighting amongst the dogs.

By taking a systems approach to a simple daily problem, I cut the time to feed the
dogs by a third, and there was less mess, less cleanup, less chaos, and no conflict.

What did I do differently that you can also do?

 Pay attention to reality, to see how your mental model is flawed, or

misaligned.
  Make new distinctions. Look at different configurations of parts in the
system.
 Find and articulate new relationships.
 And lastly, take different perspectives to truly solve the problem. So whether
it's a simple household problem, or a complex social problem, systems
thinking can help you solve it.

Reflection

 What are our takeaways from the above?

 What problem are you facing at the moment and how can you use systems
thinking to solve it?