Basic Relationships

Any situation you engage in with an intent for it to be different in the future than it currently is can be considered a problem. It’s something you have chosen to deal with. Some refer to problems as situations, or opportunities, though it doesn’t matter what you call it. If you engage with it in an attempt to make things different in the future than they are at the moment then it might as well be called a problem. Yet, have you ever thought about what the problem actually is? The answer is likely to be different than you may initially think. Russell L Ackoff, one of the giants of the systems movement, was fond of saying, "It doesn't matter where the problem first appears, the real problem is almost always somewhere else."

Often creating a simple diagram of a problem helps capture how all of the parts relate to one another. Not only does this help document the situation, but as you will soon see in the next few minutes, it can become a step by step way to communicate how the whole issue came about. Diagrams help explain a story in an easy way to understand, while documenting how we got from one simple thought to a much more involved situation.

People often comment that they are overwhelmed by causal relationships and causal relationship diagrams. I expect that the two basic reasons for this are 1) the relationships were never well defined, and 2) relationship maps are typically inflicted on people in a manner that asks of people the equivalent of eating an elephant in a single bite. I’m not surprised by the typical result.

The following two sections will unfold the two basic casual relationship structures in a manner expected to make them readily clear. Following that, I will offer some basic guidelines for creating well structured and documented causal relationship maps that you and your audience are likely to find informative, understandable and yes, maybe even insightful.