Introducing Causal Layered Analysis - Future on the Agenda

So I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite tools that I talk about very often. It's called causal layered analysis. And if you think that is a mouthful, the person who designed this is Professor Sohail Inayatullah, and I spent ages practicing how to pronounce his name. Causal layered analysis, it just means that we're going to analyze the layers that cause the layer above, and we're going to go through this. So it's a typical iceberg model, And what I'd invite you to do is, if you are old school like me and you happen to have a notepad on your table, get a pen, sketch out your typical little iceberg model, and we're going to go through that and think about a problem that you're dealing with that you could explain through, through this particular model. So we're going to start— there's 4 layers. We're going to start with what is visible. What is visible is above the waterline. It's the thing that we see, the thing we talk about, the thing that we, we report on. It's the headlines in a newspaper. And if those visible pieces of data are not good, people just hammer away at the top with their little hammer because that's the only thing they have. So I'm going to use a very simple example here. Let's think about a sales team where their sales are down. The sales figures aren't as good as they should be. So what happens is the manager and the manager's manager, they all come in and they all start yelling and say, get your figures up, sell more, do better. There's either a little bit of incentive or a little bit of a threat, but all they can do is just hammer away at the top there because they don't understand that their sales results are an inevitable result of the system that created it. A system can only create a certain outcome. It can't create a different outcome, and if the circumstances are around it, then that is what is going to be visible. So the system is flawed. If you don't like what is visible, then there's a problem with the system. In this case, it could be that the lead generation is poor, or there isn't good lead qualification, or there's the wrong kinds of incentives, or marketing and sales are misaligned. The system is flawed. It's going to produce what it produces, but if you don't like the result, then you have to change the system. And you can't just go in there and rip out a system and plug in a new one because that system— wait for it— is built on a worldview. It's how you assume the world is. And we do have vastly different worldviews. You just need to look at any political headline right now to know that there are people operating with different worldviews, and they might be sitting side by side. and they cannot see eye to eye because they're seeing through such a different set of lenses. So in this case, it could be that the worldview is sales is a battlefield. This is a dog-eat-dog world. Every customer is ours to win. Customers, you know, need to be convinced or coerced into buying, and winning means beating the competition. It's a very aggressive, competitive worldview. The worldview comes from something deeper. It comes from the myths and metaphors that are at the heart of what we talk about, how we see ourselves, how we, how we see ourselves as individuals. In this case, it could be that the myth is of the salesman being a hunter or a warrior, that this is a race, it's a competition, only the fastest person wins, and everybody else is you know, immaterial. Or it could be that, that, that myth or metaphor of a pie, and every time somebody else has a bite, then there's less of that pie for me. For those people in my speaking, colleagues know the pie metaphor quite well, because what we did was change the pie metaphor and said, let's make a bigger pie. But at this point in time, for this team, they've got this scarcity mindset. They're trapped, and they don't know what to do. So think about your example, and I really encourage you afterwards to just sketch this out again. Every time you've got a challenge, just run through this little exercise and see what might be at the heart of things. We can do this exercise very quickly, or we could really work on it. There's a group that I'm working with I'll mention later on, and we've been discussing this for 2 months, and we're going to be discussing it for another month or 2 afterwards because it really is that deep and profound a set of tools to look at. So we worked our way all the way down to the bottom, to the myths and metaphors. Now what? So now we just know that business is bad because we got the wrong metaphors. Well, what we need to do is we need to start building them up again. We need to change the stories we talk about. We change a pie being not enough for everybody to let's make a bigger pie. We change the metaphor. We can change our sales metaphor about Instead of being a race or a hunter trying to get business, well, maybe we're a guide or a gardener. Maybe we're building bridges with our customers. Maybe it's an ecosystem that we're a part of. And we start to play with those new metaphors, we can create new opportunities. So no more hammering at the top. Let's build it up from the bottom. We've got new myths and metaphors, and that's going to take us to new worldviews. If this is an ecosystem, if we're working in collaboration with people, then customers are not targets anymore. They're partners. Collaboration doesn't mean you're losing out. It means that you're growing a market, creating a new market that wasn't there before. You're solving problems, you're building. And that's a vastly different worldview to operate from. It invites so much more abundance and collaboration. And out of that will come new systems. And those systems will be about building relationships and building ecosystems. And those systems will inevitably create a set of results that will be better. They're going to be different from what they were before. You don't change the results at the top. You change what causes the results. And that top layer solves itself. It works out all by itself. I really feel like this is a very powerful model that I've used in so many things. We can look at how a business is working, looking at how you're attracting talent. It could look at your personal health life. It could look at your reputation. There's all of these different ways of using this tool to uncover things and then redesign intentionally, start to begin to craft the future that you want.