About a decade ago, I had an epiphany about whole systems thinking when my project team and I were asked to figure out why an effort to digitize the company’s backup data systems was failing. After reading about the business trends of companies converting tapes to CD-ROM, an executive at my company thought that he could save the company millions by digitizing data onto CD-ROM instead of storing larger tapes at a third-party storage facility. After six months of running on the new CD-ROM-based platform, however, the company’s savings were negligible, nowhere near expectations. When the troubleshooting team compared our process to that of companies that had successfully lowered their back-up storage costs, they quickly discovered the problem. While moving to the CD-ROM approach was a good move, it was only one of the significant changes that other companies had instituted across their whole back-up storage system. We had looked at only one piece in the data-storage chain.

Since then, I have repeatedly observed how companies – in many different situations and in many different environments – fail to understand the entire context of a problem. This is especially the case with many diversity efforts. Diversity consulting leaders such as Linda Stokes, CEO of the Orlando, Fla.-based firm PRISM International, say piecemeal efforts with narrow scopes are very common in the world of corporate diversity — usually resulting in frustration and failure. Read the full story