Analytic Thinking
From Sustainable
Why Conventional (Analytic) Thinking Fail? or Why Do We Need A Holistic Approach?
- "We live and work in an analytic prison. Working hard within this prison produces nothing. We cannot remodel the prison; we must get rid of it. To do this, a transformation is required. Cooperation between people, companies, government, countries. There will be joy in working. Everyone will win". - Dr. W. Edwards Deming, April 21, 1992, presentation, The New Economics.
Analytic Thinking: A Mindset Left Over from the Industrial Age
Since the Machine Age and Industrial Revolution, mechanization and machines have colored how we look at the world. Assembly lines, mass production, and countless machines brought with them the idea that the universe itself is a machine, not an organic, living system. Mechanistic or analytic thinking has spawned prevalent (and damaging) assumptions about the nature of people and the world itself.
Analytic Thinking Assumptions: Micro Smart and Macro Dumb
• Reductionism: If you take anything apart or reduce it to its lowest common denominator, you will ultimately reach indivisible elements. For instance, we repair car motors by taking them apart to work on their smallest parts.
• Analysis: If you take the entity/issue/problem apart, breaking it up into its components, you can solve it. Then you aggregate all the solutions and reassemble things. Analysis tends to explain things through parts, rather than a view of the whole. Even today, analysis is probably the most common technique used in organizations. Managers cut their problems down to size, reduce them to a set of solvable components, and then reassemble them into one solution. Many managers continue to see analyzing as synonymous with thinking.
• Mechanization: In this set of assumptions, virtually every phenomenon begins and ends with a single relationship: cause and effect. Environment is irrelevant. Indeed, the basis of modern scientific methods is the isolation of variables in highly controlled laboratories—an artificially closed systems view of the world.
While reductionism, analysis, and mechanism may appear to resolve problems initially, they almost always fail to provide long-term, longer-lasting solutions. Analytic thinking is such a common way of thinking that it is unconscious. Because its central, mechanistic, linear approach is to diagnose and treat only one issue at a time, other issues must wait their turn, causing further problems and unintended consequences. It’s an inherent deficiency of this thinking mode.
Analytic thinking usually assumes one cause for one effect and asks, “Is it either, or?” Paired with reductionism, analytic thinking makes us “micro-smart and macro-dumb”—good at thinking through individual elements, like solving one side of Rubik’s Cube, but prone to missing the larger, more important picture. Too often, we find ourselves with five unintended jumbled “other” sides as a result of analytic approaches to change.
Analytic Thinking Is Becoming Obsolete
The reason analytic thinking is less effective in business today than it was in earlier ages is that the global economy is increasingly complex, interconnected, and interrelated. Analytic thinking doesn’t usually consider all environmental factors as it looks for one-and-only-one best way. The environment, other systems, relationships between and among systems, and multiple and circular causalities surrounding the enterprise have great impact on daily functioning. Yet analytic thinking often looks inward instead of considering these relationships, multiple solutions, interdependencies, and environment.
Analytic, piecemeal, and reductionist thinking resists considering multiple issues and their relationships at the same time or taking a larger view of entire systems. When we approach a complex system and attempt to recognize multiple and delayed causes for every effect, we can become overwhelmed quickly and retreat back into the perceived “safety” of considering individual pieces of a problem in isolation. Unfortunately, as with a Rubik’s Cube with just one side solved, the end result is often the unintended consequences on the other sides of the organization.
