What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Ask this question to a systems thinker and two things will happen:

1. You will never get a straight answer.

2. They will take you round in circles, along the lines of ‘the more chickens you have, the more eggs you have, and the more eggs you have, the more chickens you have’. They might also go on about how long it takes for an egg to become a chicken, and other things that can affect that process.

Thinking in circles

Systems thinkers like to think in circles, or to describe it more accurately, to think in closed loops. The closed loops indicate feedback in a system, whereby actions affect outcomes and the outcomes, in turn, influence those actions. This feedback continues in cycles unless something interrupts it.

You can find examples of such feedback cycles everywhere. Here are a few:

• You feel tired so you drink coffee, coffee keeps you going so you don’t take time to rest. As a result, you feel even more tired, and you need even more coffee. The more coffee you drink, the less you rest, the more tired and reliant on coffee you become.
• A company that releases a successful product and makes good profit will have…