Everybody says they’re customer-centric. Then you watch how they work, and almost everybody behaves left-to-right, supply-side first.
Some businesses will go talk to customers – but they put what they can already do first, and then go looking for a consumer to fit it.
To us, that’s a backwards way to approach things.
We want businesses to flip this lens by looking at the consumer, figuring out if what you’re thinking of designing can play in their space, and only then make the trade-offs.
That one move changes everything, and it sits at the heart of how we think about systems.
Who should carry the hard choices – you or the customer? We think it’s you and your business.
What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking, to us, is a holistic way of looking at all the components of a product, a service or a business, and, more importantly, how they’re connected.
It’s worth separating it from design thinking, because people lump the two together. Design thinking is about understanding customer needs and then generating ideas to meet them.
Systems thinking sits underneath that. It’s the framework that asks how the whole thing is wired together – what’s connected to what, and what happens to everything else when you change one piece.
For us it’s not a side tool. It’s the fundamental thinking behind everything we’ve built, and behind every engagement we have with a client.
Systems thinking is a word used a lot in engineering, and we look at it slightly differently. Engineers tend to treat it as a static system – they like their fixed inputs, fixed outputs.
We treat it as a dynamic one. We’re trying to get people to understand the causal mechanisms: why does this thing behave the way it does, and what would have to change for it to behave differently?
Start with the end: why we think right-to-left
Here’s the part most people look at in the wrong way, and it’s why they are not customer-centric.
In engineering, you start on the left. You’d say, “Here are the inputs, here’s what the system is, here’s what the output should be”.
Re-Wired’s approach starts on the right hand side, and only then do we work backwards.
- What’s the outcome we want to achieve?
- What are the outputs it has to produce to get there?
- Then, what do I have to build in the middle to make that happen?
What we are doing here is reading the system in reverse: outcome, output, function, inputs, in that order. It sounds like a small thing, but it really isn’t.
How we apply systems thinking.
We can use it to understand how a product works.
You define what the product is, and if it’s not working, you look at the system and ask: have I thought of every way this thing is meant to work? Or do I have a piece of activity floating off on its own, disconnected from the whole, quietly breaking it? A lot of the time, that’s exactly what’s going on.
The second way is to design better ways of working inside the company. One of the most common Jobs we get hired for is “everybody’s speaking a different language.”
People in different parts of the organisation want to consume information in different ways, and nobody’s built a system that lets that happen.
So we take the current system apart, dissect it, and help them build a new one. This is where prioritisation, hitting dates, and meeting specs all hang together instead of fighting each other.
A quick note on language.
Everybody has their own specialised words for this, so the terms often sound the same. The real difference is this: most people treat their tools as standalone pieces. We treat them as one integrated system, and I need all of them to get to an answer.
Why bother reading it right-to-left?
Because it forces the trade-offs to land in the right place.
When you start from the outcome, you end up making fewer trade-offs for the consumer and more as the producer. You carry the hard choices instead of pushing them onto the customer. And we believe that’s the key to building better product.
It’s harder for you, but that’s the point.
What you get out of working this way
We don’t just use Jobs to be Done. We’re running a number of tools at the same time, and systems thinking is what feeds all of them – it provides the inputs to everything else. When you work that way, a couple of things tend to move.
Development time goes down. And the involvement of cross-functional teams goes up.
That second one matters more than it sounds.
The companies that get real results aren’t the ones with the cleverest single tool. They’re the ones who stopped letting teams sit in silos, competing against each other, and got them pulling toward one common goal instead. Systems thinking is the wiring that makes that possible.
So no – calling it systems thinking doesn’t cut it. The label’s everywhere.
The real question is which direction you’re reading it in.That’s what makes you truly customer-centric.