Systems Thinking for Business: Solve Complex Problems [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

If a problem keeps coming back after you solve it, you are not solving it. You are removing a symptom that the system regenerates on schedule.

Why the fix never holds

The pattern is always the same. Something goes wrong, somebody finds a cause that sounds right, a fix is applied, and everyone moves on. Four months later it happens again, usually to a different team, and it is treated as a new incident. I have signed off on that fix more than once. What I eventually learned is that the cause I found was the first plausible one, not the real one, and the structure and the process that produced it were never touched.

What this course actually covers

Five blocks, from how you think to how you intervene. First, critical thinking: what makes an argument strong, which biases decide what cause you find before you start looking, and the decision models for acting under uncertainty. Second, problems without a known answer: framing with 5W1H and SCQA, breaking them down with MECE, five whys and Ishikawa for the root, Pareto and the theory of constraints for where the damage sits, TRIZ for contradictions that will not compromise, and how to run all of it with a group. Third, the system as flows: describing a process in BPMN until the break point is visible to everyone. Fourth, the system as structure: the six design drivers, archetypes and matrices, the leadership layer, and how to run a transition. Fifth, intervening: diagnosis, choosing the level of intervention, delivering it, and measuring whether it worked, including return on investment.

A note on the examples

Fourteen of the thirty-eight lessons use people-side examples — hiring and onboarding processes, interventions at individual and team level. The apparatus does not depend on that. BPMN, RACI, cause-effect diagrams, the Kirkpatrick model and the balanced scorecard behave identically whatever the process contains. I am telling you now rather than letting you discover it in lesson twenty-one.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 38 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working frameworks: MECE, 5W1H, SCQA, five whys, Ishikawa, Pareto, TRIZ, BPMN, the six design drivers, Kirkpatrick

• Real organisational cases, including Wargaming and ArcelorMittal

Where to start

Take a problem your company has fixed at least twice. Write down the cause you accepted each time. If both answers describe something a person did rather than something the system arranged, you already have your first case for this course. Enrol now and start today.