Work-life Balance is a Myth: Reality is Made up of Circles - Part 1

Work-life balance as portrayed & understood in the mainstream is just a myth. Before I go on to present my case for it, I'd like to start with some insights from Systems Thinking and present a couple of examples from real-life to make it easy to connect the dots ...

Today's blogpost is inspired by and also a tribute to Peter Senge, a Systems Thinker that I adore! He is also the author of the best selling book on Systems Thinking, "The Fifth Discipline". This blogpost is centered on this profound quote from the book:

"Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

He goes on to make the case that "one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see. Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. If we want to see systemwide interrelationships, we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles. Without such a language, our habitual ways of seeing the world produce fragmented views and counterproductive actions..."

Filling a glass of water

Senge gives a simple example from real-life - filling a glass of water. While most of us don't view that as a system, Senge elegantly articulates how it actually is: "When we fill a glass of water we operate in a water-regulation system involving five variables: our desired water level, the glass’s current water level, the gap between the two, the faucet position, and the water flow. These variables are organized in a circle or loop of cause-effect relationships which is called a “feedback process.” The process operates continuously to bring the water level to its desired level."

He goes on to explain the different types of loops - reinforcing loops (e.g.: compound interest) and balancing loops (e.g.: thermostat). If you are interested to learn more, I'd recommend the book for more details.

As a society, it is high time we moved past linear reductionist thinking. We must learn to think in circles or loops - i.e., Systems Thinking. Things are very loopy in real life - for example, if the Fed wants to do something to the market, then the market has done something to the Fed. Real life is a complex web of variables that have complex inter-dependencies and interactions. The same phenomenon is at play at home, schools, organizations, governments, countries, etc. To understand the loopy nature of our world better, let me now discuss a different but complex real-life example - an "ecosystem" case study of Yellowstone National Park...

How Wolves Change Rivers 

I've discussed this case study in my podcast with Rohit Sethi if you are interested in more details. But, here is a quick summary from this documentary: "Wolves were reintroduced to the National Park in 1995. Before that they were absent for about 70 years... So, the numbers of deer had built up to a point they reduced much of the vegetation there to almost nothing. After the wolves arrived, they killed some of the deer. But more importantly, they changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park – the places where they could be trapped most easily – particularly the valleys and the gorges and immediately those places started to regenerate. In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood. And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in. The number of beavers started to increase because beavers like to eat the trees. And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians... But here’s where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed. More riffle sections. All of which were great for wildlife habitats. The rivers changed in response to the wolves. And the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often. So the rivers became more fixed in their course."

Here is an example of a causal loop diagram for this case study (source):

One could argue how much of this was pre-calculated and how much of this was "butterfly effect". But, as the saying goes, "All models are wrong, but some are useful!" (Note: The quote is originally from George Box who said that in a different context (statistics)). Also, from a second-order cybernetics stand-point, as Heinz Von Foerster put it, "The map is the territory - because we don’t have anything else but maps..." and so we have to get better at our map making skills!

When we get a headache, we don't directly go for a brain surgery. We usually pop a pill in our mouth, which then goes into the stomach and then eventually reduces/stops the headache. Similarly in organizations, when some employees say that we have a "quality problem" or "productivity problem" or "security problem", we must understand that none of these problems are present in isolation. No problem lies in isolation in a complex system - they are all deeply interconnected. We need to think in loops to identify & deploy our metaphorical "wolves" and "pill". For leaders, it is critical to have a systemic worldview of the organization in order to avoid fixing symptoms, implementing superficial & counterproductive "solutions". I've discussed more about this shift from management to leadership in this blogpost.

Work-life Balance

Now, let's look at how this concept applies to work-life balance. Well, the way work-life balance is understood by most is that it is a zero-sum game - it implies that there is a strict trade-off. The reality is far from it! Watch this short clip (50 seconds) in which Jeff Bezos explains how it is actually work-life harmony and a circle instead of a balance:

I noticed the same phenomenon play out in my own life as well. I've written about my weight-loss journey in the past. As explained in that blogpost, as I transitioned away from "management by results" to "management by means", I also started noticing the other reinforcing loops in my life. I lost about 45 lbs and broke all of my previous weight loss records and have sustained it for over 2 years now. But, in hindsight, weight loss was the least of my successes. I’m much more happier, healthier (biomarkers from bloodwork), sleep better, more stress-free at home, more productive at work and my entire family is also healthier and happier as a result.

If Peter Senge gave us the theory and Jeff Bezos showed us in practice, I wondered what Joe Rogan would say if he were to do a viral marketing video about this concept and I stumbled upon 👉🏾 this goldmine 👈🏾 🙂!

I'll touch upon a couple of more leadership case studies in Part 2. Until then, I invite you to think about the reinforcing and balancing loops in your own life.