Inch me and Pinch Me are in a System...
- Christine VIDAUD
- 6 juin 2021
- 3 min de lecture
Did Inch Me start it, or was it Pinch Me? Inch Me and Pinch Me are both firmly convinced that the other person started it. So Inch Me will pinch Pinch Me, Pinch Me will pinch Inch Me a little harder…. and here we are, like kids at school, in a linear escalation that probably won’t end well.
Does this remind you of a situation you have experienced or been subjected to?
The Stalemates of Linear Thinking
It’s not surprising! We all have playground remnants and an unfortunate tendency to think in a linear way: A leads to B. B is caused by A.
“Helen is uncooperative, and sometimes even aggressive in meetings. That’s why the project is not making any progress and John is working on it almost by himself”. A leads to B.
Or: “The reason I won’t work with John on this project is because he interrupts me every time I talk about it during team updates. He’s looking for trouble”. B is caused by A.
The result is that this often-erroneous view of reality can lead to terrible stalemates, an escalation of destructive behaviour and unfortunate decisions. Inch Me and Pinch Me will be covered in pinch marks, prisoners of “he started it”. Rather sad, isn’t it?
Systemic theory and Circular Causality
But cheer up! Systemic Theory – inspired by the complexity of the living world* – considers reality not in a linear fashion but in a circular fashion: A leads to B, who acts retroactively on A, and so forth. Retroaction (also called feedback in cybernetics – yes, the same feedback applied by managers who are developing their teams) can produce vicious circles or virtuous circles depending on the ingredients injected into the loop.
If Helen decides to go and talk to her colleague before the team update to ask him to put his questions after the project update rather than during it (positive injection), there’s a good chance he won’t interrupt her (1st positive retroaction). Helen will therefore be more relaxed and more inclined to cooperate with John (2nd positive retroaction)… who wasn’t "looking for trouble", just asking his questions as they came to him.
A tiny change in their interactions and the entire relational loop between Helen and John changes through retroaction.
Imagine the effect on the scale of a system! We’re not far from the Butterfly effect!
Our beliefs also act retroactively!
And if circular causality is perfectly verified in our behaviour, it also does wonders with our beliefs! To illustrate this point, here is the emblematic example of the Pygmalion effect, discovered by Robert Rosenthal, an American psychologist at the University of California. The experiment highlighted that a subject A who has expectations vis-à-vis the behaviour or results of another subject B elicited, in this second subject, the expected behaviour or results… thus reinforcing A’s behaviour vis-à-vis B.
The experiment: teachers – of an equivalent educational quality – were given classes of children – also of an equivalent academic ability. At the beginning of the experiment, Robert Rosenthal presented to them the results of a True/False performance questionnaire: some teachers would have gifted and hard-working pupils for some classes and others would have mediocre and lazy pupils. The experiment showed that teachers developed behaviour and attitudes whose effect was to cause their pupils to match predictions. Classes of children reputed to be gifted thus became better than those reputed to be mediocre.
Powerful, eh?
So let’s get rid of the linear thinking of Inch Me and Pinch Me, and adopt a CIRCULAR mindset! And we should be aware and convinced of 2 things:
we are all, to a certain extent, co-authors of the situations we experience;
a little thing is enough to trigger a systemic change, so opt for positive little things!
And what about you?
What are the professional or personal situations where you find yourself a prisoner of linear logic?
What insight does the circular causation principle give you in such situations?
What positive element could you inject into the loop to initiate a change towards a virtuous circle?
What in particular would you observe that would attest to this positive change?
* Indeed, Systemic theory was largely inspired by Cybernetics, action science orientated towards a goal, based on the study of order and communication processes in living beings, in machines and within sociological and economic systems.