2 minute read

We live and work in a world that has many interconnected parts.  Our workplaces are connected by systems of people, technology, supply chains, customers, local and global capital markets to name just a few. 

Doing work that matters means changing things and making them better. Changing one part of a system because we see a problem we have a ready solution for is tempting, but this can have much bigger consequences if we aren’t careful. 

Learn from the rangers at Yellowstone National Park in the United States and take the time to understand if your actions to make something better will solve one problem but make the whole system worse.

In 1886 after decades of declining elk population in Yellowstone National Park due to poachers and hunters, the United States Cavalry were called in to run the park.  They acted quickly to stop further losses by banning hunting and deterring poachers and started a program of special feeding and favourable treatment.  Their strategy was to protect and grow the population rapidly.

The program worked so well the elk population quickly became abundant and started overgrazing, depleting essential flora and causing soil erosion. 

They overconsumed young aspen trees which caused the beaver population to decline.  The dams the beavers built were important because they slowed the surging spring waters and kept them clean so trout could spawn.  Without the beavers the ecosystem started to deteriorate rapidly.

In the winter of 1919, the elk population declined by roughly 60% through starvation or disease.

The park rangers concluded the decline it must have been due to native predators.  They were oblivious to the fact that the explosion in elk population was causing food shortages for multiple species within the Park.  Their next course of action was to drastically reduce wolves, mountain lions and coyotes.  The more predators they killed the worse the situation became.

By the mid 1900s they had all but eliminated these predators.  The population of game animals experienced years of erratic booms and busts thereafter.

Coyotes, Wolves and Mountain Lions were reintroduced to the park several decades later and the ecological balance has now been restored.

It was only after understanding the real reasons for the elk population fluctuations and the impacts this was having on the overall park ecology, seeing the park as a system of systems, were the rangers able to take the right actions to restore balance.

Remember to think about the effects your actions could have when you go to solve your next problem.  Are you going to make one part of a system better but cause the overall system to be worse off?   Ask the question: if we do this then what happens?

Solve problems, don’t create disasters.

Don’t forget about the beavers.

Strategies to avoid creating disasters when making changes to systems of systems:

1. Look at the whole system before a change – if you are improving part of a process or system, take the time to understand how it works as a system of systems and consider how one change might cause impacts on other systems.  It’s good to run tests or parallel simulations in these situations.

2. Check for limited slack systems – a limited slack system is where there is limited time to intervene when a process goes from one stage to the next.  Where you have these, build in redundancies like airplane engineers build in buffers and redundancies to avoid failure.