1 Simplifying complexity
I recall a story (told by a marketing person) about a group of professionals, each given a barometer and asked to find the height of a church tower. The physicist, who remembered that air pressure changes with height, took the barometer reading at the bottom and at the top of the tower to calculate the height. The engineer dropped the barometer and timed its descent to the ground to work out the tower’s height. The architect lowered the barometer on a piece of string till it touched the ground and measured the string. The surveyor measured the shadow cast by the upright barometer and by the tower and used the ratio so found to calculate the tower’s height. The marketing person went to the Sexton and said ‘If you tell me the height of the tower, I will give you this barometer’.
The story illustrates two important points. Firstly, as I noted above, that people and their viewpoints are part of the situations we normally have to deal with. Secondly, there is more than one way to handle any situation. I have also noted that systems thinking can simplify complexity by taking multiple partial views. That needs some explanation.
