How the Cobweb Effect Can Transform Your Business

You made a plan when starting your business: sell, make money. But have you found your busy, entrepreneurial self constantly putting out fires? That’s the problem with linear thinking.

In life and in business, we’re used to thinking in linear terms. A precedes B. I fuel up my car, then I drive it. I sell something, then I receive money. A brings B — cause and effect.

However, it’s rarely that simple in business.

Linear Versus System Thinking

The reason for this complexity is that everything has a ripple effect. It might seem as if taking on a new client and earning more money is the best step in helping you reach your business goal. But it’s not as simple as A then B. That new client causes a ripple in your business, bringing about what I refer to as feast then famine. You focus on that new client and the revenue feast they bring in, without continuing to build your business pipeline. Then what happens when that client leaves? There’s the famine.

System thinking, however, is realising how everything connects. One decision about one client affects your business as a whole. Where linear thinking only believes A affects B, system thinking understands how A affects B, B affects A, and C affects B.

The easiest way to understand this is picturing a line versus a cobweb network of cause and effect. As you might guess, linear thinking is a line while system thinking works as a cobweb. Everything is cause and effect.

If you can adopt system thinking instead of linear thinking, you can feast more often without having to worry about the famine.

What’s Wrong with Linear Thinking

Linear thinking makes you vulnerable. It creates a blindspot, essentially, because you can’t see even two steps ahead. You’re only looking to the next thing. The reason this creates a problem is because of that ripple. When you only focus on the next step, you aren’t thinking about the consequences of that next step on all the other elements of your business.

Let’s wrap an example around that. Say I just got a new client. I need that paycheck, so I said yes to the first person who came my way. I took on a type of project I had never done before, causing me to pour all my energy into learning those new skills. It was custom to that particular client.

So here I am, working all hours, not able to spend time with family or friends, ignoring my healthy routine, all for that paycheck. All for one, single feast.

That’s when famine hits. I spent too much time trying to please this custom client that I did not have time to find any new clients. With that job over, I now have nothing new to work on and no leads to follow.

This is the main problem with linear thinking. You can become so consumed with earning B from A that you forget to plan out any other step.

Another negative to linear thinking is the complexity it brings. If your focus lies solely on that custom client, you may find you need to hire someone to help deliver elements beyond your skillset. Now you have to pay that freelancer.

Or maybe you need to purchase new software to deliver the product to the custom client. Again, there’s money gone. All because, ironically, you needed that paycheck.

What’s Great About System Thinking

System thinking allows you to see the whole map. It allows you to see how the pieces of your business all work together as cogs in your business machine.

This means you can actually engineer your business to work for you instead of you working for your business.

With linear thinking, you become the string that links everything in your business — meaning you do all the extra communication and putting out of fires. But if you design the system, if you design that business machine, then you’re no longer overworking yourself because you’re no longer the string connecting every aspect of your business.

How to Implement System Thinking

That might all sound a bit abstract, so let’s put some concrete steps to system thinking.

Start by taking inventory of every piece of your business. First, think about all the important people who have to do with your business. Maybe they’re your freelancers. Maybe they’re your clients, your employees, key influencers, even people who refer you.

Then move on to other things like software, systems you have in place, and your processes. These things are the grease between your cogs.

Once you’ve listed out the different pieces of your business, figure out how all these pieces link together.

Sometimes you’ll see how they aren’t linked together at all. Those are the linear thinking spots. Those are the spots where you as the entrepreneur are the link, the single line, the centre of the hub. You’re the one communicating between those disconnected pieces that work separately.

Instead of working on your strengths, you spend your time putting out fires, communicating (sometimes miscommunicating), and working on gaps where you’ve realised you’re missing a fundamental person to do that work.

Once you see all those disconnected pieces, get rid of the ones you don’t need. Try standardising as much as you can so your business machine stays the same. It shouldn’t matter if you have one client or 10. All those clients should be standardised so you can use the same elements with each of them.

The only thing left after standardising is getting back to focusing on your strengths. The goal here is to be able to fire yourself from working as that string connecting everything. Your business does not solely depend on you, and you only deliver top-notch work.

This is the business machine.

No more filling in the gaps. No more putting out fires. No more famines.

If you need a bit of help going from linear thinking to system thinking, book a call with me. I can help map your business to scale and simplify your processes. You’ll be in business machine mode in no time.