Systems & Habits
BFNow Self-Study Module 4 – Overview
[This is part of the BFNow Self-Study section of this site. For more about this section, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]
The first three modules had somewhat of a “beingness” focus:
Module 1 with its focus on getting more comfortable with yourself and your inner complexity
Module 2 with strengthening your capacity to see and understand the world in more nuanced terms
Module 3 with understanding and taking steps to heal your common childhood traumas
Module 4 marks a shift to a stronger focus on supporting your agency, your capacity to get things done on your own and with others. This shift of focus will continue in the succeeding modules.
I like to think of this module as having two mutually supportive tracks: system principles and their application to habits.
We’ll be looking at basic characteristics of systems in which there is a flow of cause and effect, of influence and consequence. These are primarily mechanistic systems. We’ll get to complex adaptive systems in Module 6.
To illustrated the principles and make them personal, you’ll be working with one of your habits and exploring how understanding it as a system can help you increase it or decrease it, whichever you like, more effectively.
In each of the first four explorations, the first part will describe a general system concept and the experiential will then support you in applying it to your habit.
The fifth exploration blends the content in Module 3 and this module to create system diagrams for each of the character styles showing what keeps them in place and how you could intervene to change them.
As usual, you can get some value out of this module by reading it and you will get significantly more value if you do the experientials.
In preparation for working with the explorations and your habit, I recommend:
Watch or re-watch Systems Literacy, Part 2, starting at 2:50. This is the one that has Relationship Ping-Pong, Constraints and Habits.
You’ll be diagramming your habit as a system. You can do this on paper or electronically. Regardless of which you plan to do, watch the following demo video by Josie Straka, one of our main guides in the original Bright Future Now program. The video describes how to use draw.io, the free diagramming software I recommend, but the video is much more than a software tutorial. It is the best way I know to introduce you to the essential idea of this module. Seriously, watch. this. video.
If you prefer to work on paper, here is a link for the habits diagram that you can print out to serve as a guide and template ( Habits.pdf)
If you’d like to work electronically, there are many software options, like miro.com. If you don’t already have some diagramming software you like, I recommend you use a program that is called both draw.io and diagrams.net. It’s free, works in your browser or you can download it to run locally on your computer. Either way works fine for our purposes. In the PS below I have a link to the habits diagram in a form that you can import into draw.io and instructions on how to do so.
Josie’s demo gives you a great start on how to use draw.io. You can supplement that with Video Tutorials and Step-by Step Guides. There is also a more extended tutorial series as web pages and as a video playlist. Ignore everything that talks about using draw.io in Confluence since it works independently.
Key Concepts and Terms
These are the key concepts and terms that I encourage you to pay special attention to in this Module. They are part of the shared language we are building. Many, but not all, of these are also in the titles of the daily emails:
systems: part, relationships, boundary, context
nesting subsystems
systems as maps, as interface
systems: diagrams, descriptions, dynamics
inputs, outputs, loops
timescales and timelags
reinforcing and balancing feedback loops
thresholds
tipping points
influence
necessary vs sufficient
constraint/ limiting factor
In this module, you'll have the opportunity to apply many of the terms that were introduced in the Systems Literacy presentation.
As usual, we’ll also be building on concepts and experiences from the presentations and the previous modules, including:
systems, territories and maps (Systems Literacy Part 1 and Module 2)
character styles (Module 3)
A visual map for this module’s content
Here’s the diagram with the titles for each exploration plus the previous modules for context. The curved arrows show connections where one day’s email particularly influences or feeds into another. The angular arrows show the influence from a whole module, sometimes on a whole later module and sometime on a particular later day.
Module 4 Explorations
Diagrams & Descriptions – Exploration 1
Timescales, Timelags & Feedback – Exploration 2
Thresholds & Tipping Points – Exploration 3
Character Diagrams – Exploration 5
PS - Importing Habits.xml file into diagrams.net
Here are the steps so that you can use that file as a starting point for your diagramming:
Click this link: Habits.xml, which will open up a page with computer code. Don’t be concerned. That’s as it should be.
In the upper right of the page there will be an icon with a downward-pointing arrow. Click on that icon to download the Habits.xml file to your computer. It will likely go into your downloads folder.
In your web browser, go to diagrams.net.
If this is your first time at diagrams.net, you will need to choose a place to store your diagrams. Unless you have a strong reason to choose a cloud service, I recommend you choose Device, which means your local computer.
You will then be asked to either Create New Diagram or Open Existing Diagram. Choose Open Existing Diagram.
In the file selection dialogue that comes up, find and select the Habits.xml file you downloaded in step 2.
That’s it! The Habits diagram should open up ready for your modifications.
Use diagrams.net’s File menu to save your modified diagram. If you save it back to your computer, it will likely be saved in your downloads folder. You can use Save As … to create multiple versions.