Convergent Thinking & Decision Making: Three Archetypes Every Manager Should Know

The American Production & Inventory Control Society (APICS) is a non-profit international education organization that regularly hosts continuing education & development events for its members. We presented “Three System Archetypes every Manager Should Know”, one of our boot camp offerings, for a mixed audience of professional practitioners, graduate students, project managers, and engineers.

We presented a brief overview of Structured Systems Thinking including how to distinguish between the visible and latent system effects as well as how to read system archetype models. We then reviewed three common system archetypes managers encounter: Limits-to-Growth, Fixes-that-Fail, and Drifting-Goals. We illustrated how managers might recognize the presence of these archetypes in their daily work. And for each archetype we indicated how problems arose by only attempting to create a fix in the “visible” system and what that caused in the latent, or hidden, system structure. We also provided more holistic suggestions and policy options that enabled navigating these archetypes that both increased performance while avoiding problems.