What would happen when you divide an elephant in half?
Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. What happens then? We will not understand what an elephant is when it sum is greater than the parts. Or it creates one very dead and messy elephant.
Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole; to understand the most challenging managerial issues requires seeing the whole system that generates the issues. To do that, it is important that one learns to step away from the tree to see and understand the forest before dealing with it.
Yet, when an organization deals with issues, what do we typically do? Divide the responsibility of dealing with the problem by the role or function that you hold. Training. HR. Operations. Marketing. Finance. And so on.
This often leads to suboptimal decisions, repeated tasks, lost time and energy, and maybe even losing customers.
Notice what happened in the case of the urgent file case study, when we did not pay attention to the leverage action step. How much did it cost the organization to reverse the effects of the issue, generated by the whole?
Systems Thinking Research & Leadership Development Institute (STRLDi) 
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