MY MILESTONES:
I have a tertiary background in management but it was Senge‘s seminal works that allowed me to see better what a practice of management would look like, That was twenty three years ago and I have not turned back since.
1989 As I joined the workforce at first the private sector and later the public service, I discover that the tertiary training I had attended at the National University of Singapore, School of Management, Business Administration programme while it provided theoretical underpinnings of what can happen, it did not easily translate into actions I can use both as a leader and strategist. I began to sit with the question: “What drives the thinking behind our interactions with each other and the task at hand and how do we translate these into results for the team as well as beyond it?”
1996 I chanced the works by Peter Senge in 1996. I was placed within a masterplanning team with the Home Affairs Ministry in Singapore. To prepare us for the programme, sixty officers from across the Ministry attended a week-long course with Dr Daniel Kim, an associate of Dr Peter Senge. He was invited to conduct the programme by Mr Peter Chan, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry at that time.
As I underwent the programme, it began to answer for me the questions I had been holding back from seven years ago. The answers stacked up for me, and since then, there has been no turning back. The work proved so formative and ground-breaking as it can get, for me, let us say, it has spoiled me for all other works that was to come after that. The work can explain any other works. That is putting it mildly.
1997-2008 Assigned as a lead facilitator for programmes to facilitate or train police officers in the understanding and use of the five disciplines.
2000 Four years on, I attended a year-long programme in 1999 under the tutelage of Dr Daniel Kim, once again and Ms Diane Cory. This programme prepares public officers to be internal consultants of the work for their organization. I graduated the programme in 2000 while also acting as teaching aide to my peers.
2003 and 2008 During this period, my practice increasingly evolved from within my organizations to also include the use and application of the work across various organizations in the public sector as well as presented at conferences around the region in Asia including Vietnam Cambodia, Indonesia, India and Hong Kong.
I also founded and setup a practitioners’ network in Singapore (the predecessor of SoL Singapore today) with a view to share the works beyond the public sector to all sectors in and around Singapore. I presented my early works of the onion at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference in 2006.
The practice increasingly involved shared spaces. This would include ares such as education, or regional conflicts or as in more recently in the case of Botswana define and work with persistent issues of national interests. I use these persistent issues as an entry point for the works with the national client.
The Shift There is a reason why I choose not to work in organizational spaces. It is deliberate. In my first ten years with this work, I attempted to build the practices of Systems Thinking and Shared Vision within the Singapore Police Force and we would inevitably hit a dead-end or a wall every time with that practice. The thinking of the system is always bigger (the forest) than the mandates of organizations that are within it (the trees).
This lends itself well to the analogy of missing the forest for the trees. And that is why I began deliberately to learn to find ways to conduct the practice at national spaces (seeking out the forests). More here on my reflections: https://sheilasingapore.wordpress.com/national-systemic-study-programmes-sol/
2005, 2008 The opportunity arose for me in 2005 and again in 2008, when the Government of Botswana invited me to conduct the first retreat session for their cabinet in 2005. The Head of the Public Service then saw the results of a systemic analyses that I did on their national plans and began taking well to the works.
I was then signed on in 2008 for a four-year work in the country to take the ideas of the five disciplines across their public sector for both the central (federal) and local government senior officials. This went on till about 2012. Close to 1000 personnel underwent three sets of four day programmes.
In the meantime, I began to shape the next steps, which is to conduct research on their persistent issues (https://pinnacleacademy.weebly.com/stldiafrica.html). It required setting up a team within the government space to organize the works, But with change of management hands of the project, we agreed it was then not the opportune time to proceed on this step.
2013 I decided in 2013, to setup my practice and organization here in Botswana with a view to build three distinct arms of this work: training, research and consultancy and focus on creating the processes required in building and handling the issue and on completion they become case studies. The time also allowed me to assimilate my personal experiences on the continent.
In the meantime, I worked at building a team with the local capacity to do (https://pinnacleacademy.weebly.com/aboutus.html) these works jointly with future clients as they may happen. In 2018, I was primed in both. The process as well as the team. The name of the organization is called Systems Thinking Leadership Development Institution (STLDi).
2018 In the middle of 2018, an opportunity arose to study the state of national unemployment in Botswana. The study involved collecting data over a fifty-year period and covering demographics ranging from population, education attainments and performance of the economy by sectors. The study reached a good conclusion in early 2019 by February.
MY EARLY JOURNEY
At criminal intelligence unit in the Force, I assumed positions at one point as the heads of Crime Statistics Branch and eventually of the Processing Division at the Immigration Intelligence Unit on secondment.
I eventually returned to the Force firstly as part of the doctrines unit at criminal intelligence where I was also tasked at writing the criminal intelligence master plan for the Home Affairs ministry. After ten years at intelligence, I moved and spent another eight years (from the year 2000) heading the unit tasked with building SPF’s capacity (training and consulting) on the works of Learning Organization and the five disciplines. This was housed at the Corporate Planning Division of PHQ.
I then became involved in drawing up processes and developing annual corporates workplans for the organization including facilitating meetings led by Commissioner and the Police Annual Conferences. But my focus was on understanding persistent issues officers faced on the ground, such as piling up of urgent files, natures of certain crimes, manpower turnover, assisting units develop their organizational statements and so on.
There was one thread, however, that held all of these tasks together for me.
MY TURNING POINT
To understand this, I would like to take us back to my stint at Crime Statistics. As I compiled the statistics on crime I would notice the behavior of the pattern of data over time, displayed a persistent nature as if despite the efforts of the Force and of the country, the patterns took on a deliberate course. Such patterns are evident for data that spans beyond twenty years. Such behaviours are not obvious with three or five years data.
That intrigued me and I became curious about it. Three years later, I was in a workshop with Dr Daniel Kim and seeing as such the works of Learning Organization and Systems Thinking in particular. When I saw the behaviour over time graphs of the ten system archetypes, I began to understand the graphs I had seen as Head of Crime Statistics. That was the turning point for me and the work that I am doing currently.
I eventually tutelaged with Daniel Kim and his wife Diane Cory on a year-long programme through the Civil Service College and went on to meet Dr Peter Senge and eventually setup a network of practitioners in Singapore which garnered interests in the region. This is the predecessor of SoL Singapore which Tara Kimbrell-Cole is heading currently. She has kindly consented to lead my Singapore office with Danny Han (a former police officer who had worked with me previously).
MY CURRENT WORKS
The rest as we say is history including my journey half-way around the world where I was able to exercise and test the work at a national space. The country, people and government of Botswana has been a kind ally in this space for me and it has allowed me to develop the first-ever study globally, using the tools of the Learning Organization on an issue of a persistent nature at a national scale. This involved research – the third arm of this work.
I am currently building a local team and programmes and I am keeping my eyes open for studies at regional and eventually global scales. I have now projects building up with Namibia and the UN on the ‘drying up of lands’ and with UNAIDS on the HIV and AIDs epidemic that we are seeing happen globally. These will become material that will be used to develop post-graduate master’s programme in the work. Still, I would continue to provide direction and work closely with the Singapore team, mostly remotely, but sometimes, on-site as well. And with all projects, I would provide the lead from the front.
NEXT STEPS: Often the cause that influences persistent issues is not obvious and therefore the issue stays resistant to change. This affects and creates “victims of society” (be they retrenchments, difficulties in building entrepreneurships, capacity to work together or seeing beyond the obvious, narrowing the income inequalities, dealing with underlying tensions along different lines, willingness to flex the mind or innovate) as well as adding up costs to the nation. Searching for these causes is the focus of the work I do.
MY OFFER:
I would like at this point place an offer to present and share the study (click on the link here to access the study) that I did here in Botswana with you and/or a team. The study illustrates the use of the work I do on one such resistant issue for the country. Unemployment.
The country currently has possibly a million persons who are not employed formally and that is, three-quarters of its working population. While the outcome was obvious, the causes were not. Both the government and the people react to dealing with the pain of the problem. The number of non-traditional crimes such as stealing of copper cables and cattle (it is a major industry), money laundering and drug peddling are therefore on the rise. Meanwhile the government reacts by easing trade regulations and seeking out investors. The study goes on to present what could happen as a nation to turn it around. It needed rallying the nation but not before all of us see the underlying story together. A leader that facilitates systemic understanding is in a very unique position to play this role for the nation.
Could I arrange to setup the presentation of the study to you? If it allows you to see what the work can look like, that is a good first step in the process.
Systems Thinking Research & Leadership Development Institute (STRLDi) 