Who We Are
The Texas office of Systems Thinking Institute was founded in 2009 with the mission of building capacity for key leaders and the teams they serve.
For companies who qualify, the Systemkey™ Risk Intelligence Framework (srif) delivers exponential gains in operations, financial transparency and talent nurturing, for beyond-the-enterprise improvements in risk results. These advantages extend company-to-company across the entire value/supply chain, depending on how faithfully the operational model is implemented.
Companies powered by Systemkey™ solutions enjoy ongoing gains many times the cost of assessment and implementation. While we believe our solutions offer value to every business (7500:1 ROI at enterprise level), 85% of businesses do not pass the third-tier screening, (learn why). What could your company (and your leadership team) gain by fostering an environment where people tell you what you need to hear, rather than what they think you want to hear?
From humble beginnings:
DEMO2010 Launch Video:
Shortlink to: Overcoming Learned Blindness (open in new tab or window)Through our cloud-based equipping platform, solutions powered by Systemkey™ deploy an xml-structured suite with people, process and product resources for improvements across multiple lines of business — or just those you selectively choose. The ability to deploy a layered framework, with only the amount of overhead you choose, growing the capacity for communications clarity across business units both vast and small, is one of the key distinguishing features of our tailored solutions.
Visit our download library (menu #1) or to open the conversation and learn how to deploy a scalable risk solution powered by Systemkey,™ contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.
About the Founder
Matthew E. Weilert
, (Texas A&M '84), helps leaders and the people they serve, to achieve profound clarity in seeing beyond the commonplace to the entire supply chain, through the lens of faith. As an international innovator in system safety and risk, Matt recognizes his achievements only come through meeting people and their needs. Advising billion-dollar brands like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Bacardi, GM & the US Navy on what it takes to go fromgood to greatin performance improvements (ops & finance), Matt is a
global mindset thinker(Thunderbird 2011), who has the privilege of working with networks of leaders across industries (see http://globe.systemkey.net) to deliver better results across all organizational dimensions.
What We Do
The Systemkey™ Risk Intelligence Framework delivers business intimacy that drives radical reduction in risk exposures.
Benefits of Business Intimacy
- See more clearly.
- Solve problems so they stay solved.
- Bring the whole brain of your whole workforce to work on your business.
For companies who qualify (85% do not pass the third-tier of screening), the benefits exponentially outweigh the investment of time, talent and treasure required. Visit our download library (menu #1) or contact us to learn more.
Resolving Residual Risk
Solution-centric vs. Software-centric
Imagine if Carnival Cruise Lines had our technology: they would be $5 billion richer! While no amount of money replaces a loved one; the financial markets hammered Carnival with an 18% drop in their stock value as a reputation risk penalty
which was several times the cost of replacing the Costa Concordia cruise ship.
Imagine if Toyota had access to our insight: they would've avoided tragic family deaths, a 10mm vehicle recall and the global PR nightmare that went with it! As one of the best run companies in the world, (prior to this fiasco), they are a living lesson that not only must we learn continuously, we must have strategies to challenge our cherished traditions and slay our sacred cows lest we ourselves get sacrificed on the chopping block of groupthink and learned blindness.
Imagine if BP had deployed the Red Sky™ risk discovery practices on Deepwater operations: they would have avoided a 62% drop in their stock price, 11 families losing loved ones and a Gulf of Mexico environmental disaster.
Catastrophes cascade from hundreds of thousands of separate 15-second decisions [See Carlzon, Moments of Truth], so only a human approach will deliver the inherently human connection that generates the trust people require to tell their leadership about so-called trivial
details, like an SUV-sized floor-mat that was too big for a Lexus sedan, resulting in millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on proving brakes were not the problem, as well as the failures mentioned above.
Across the risk management industry, those running companies committed to today's software-centric business models desperately cling to the notion that somehow we will solve the challenges of complexity with ever more complexity, rather than increasing clarity. At the end of the day, there are only two kinds of risks:
- those you don't know about
- those your
experts
have discounted
and it's primarily these latter ones that are the most damaging, because the hubris of seen it all, done it all
can only be conquered by a radical willingness to ask ridiculous, unreasonable and irrational questions. Those who argue the point are either deeply embedded in the Emperor's Court or so enamoured of their silo-mentality that they themselves are one of the chief risks at their enterprise!
Comprehensive end-to-end solutions powered by Systemkey™ in development now, will set the next-generation standard for the way risks are measured and mannaged—from the seabed to the stars.
Resolving Residual Risk
Several journalists have opined on why neither Kodak nor Polaroid invented Instagram. The iceberg answer
is they didn't think of it.
It was out of their field of view.
That's a great definition of residual risk! The label iceberg
conveys in a very visual way that the answer you are receiving is a part of a much larger answer, three-quarters of which you are not getting told, either for reasons of:
- Time
- Message transmit length limits, or perhaps
- Those in whose presence the message must be spoken
are not security-cleared to hear the details.
All of these factors and more go into a layered communication decision. In the style of a classic Thomas Nast political cartoon, imagine a large crate held securely by the webbing of a cargo net, being swung across from the steamer to the dock. The net is labeled business intimacy while the crate is labeled catastrophe and off to one edge of the box we see fraying threads labeled:
- Human Resources
- Finance
- Operations
- Attendance
- Material Selection
- Compliance
- Process Management
- …etc.
Only the Systemkey™ Risk Intelligence Framework (srif) weaves all these loose threads together to restore and maintain the safety net that market-leading companies operate within.
Solution-centric not Software-centric
Current risk management solutions take a software approach, because it is what so-called experts
told the C-suite it's what their competitors use. It's what they think works because they're not challenging the status quo to ask How could it be different?
so they settle for far less than the results their current investment should bring them. Software is not the culprit. Software is designed and run by people.
Everyone reading this knows that.
The soldiers in the classic children's fable Stone Soup understood that people are virtuously seduced into good behavior by good theatre.
People voluntarily change their behavior in positive ways when they are immersed in an environment that supports that improvement.
When people trust you, they will tell you what you need to hear, not just what they think you want to hear.
Your Risk Intelligence Framework powered by the Systemkey™ Risk Modeling Language will deliver exponential results expressly because it restores the rich cream of local context to the skim milk of today's business environment. Trust is the fruit of the flower created by business intimacy. In today's sound-bite world, nuanced thought is almost a forgotten art. Think over the sentence above for a moment:
No business intimacy = no trust = no insight.
Other enterprise risk tools are still siloed by design. It allows them to be pretty good at their area of focus, but there's no incentive to tie them together. Making money this quarter is a highly valuable metric of business effectiveness, yet making lots of money can blind leaders to the need for updating their worldview. Groupthink is one of the most insidious contributors of enterprise catastrophe (Force Majeure excluded).
Figures on a page in a report on a shelf don't do much for anyone. While insurance has its place in the total risk matrix, it truly doesn't matter much if your plant, ship, pipeline, data warehouse, etc. just became a memory moments ago. Structured dialog, powered by Systemkey™ gets people focused on the real issues, challenges and resource allocations required to mitigate the identified risks.
Want to learn more? Visit our download library (menu #1) or contact us, let's open the conversation.
Pain:
Despite nearly one trillion dollars a year ($T/yr) globally spent on ERM (enterprise risk management), global catastrophes continue. When asked about skills they most needed in their firms over the next five years, 1500+ global managers responded, by a 3:1 margin, that cross-disciplinary insight was the talent most required to conquer the complexity of their businesses. Without it, residual risks remain undiscovered.
Complexity will never be solved by more complexity, but rather by increasing clarity to recognize messenger events
that signal impending failures. Analysis of the past 50 years of catastrophes across industries points as bright as a beacon that the gap is the human understanding of today’s complexity.
Solution:
Systemkey™ Risk Solutions deliver businesss intimacy with an integrated & cross-disciplinary approach (product/process/people).
- Product: Red Sky™ Risk Suite v1.63
- Process: Semantic Compression™ Risk Discovery
- People: Systemkey™ Risk Modeling Language
The XML-structured Systemkey™ risk modeling language uses our proprietary Semantic Compression™ to unlock additional value in the software-centric solutions companies use today. By distilling conversations from the boardroom to the coalface, Red Sky™ highlights the messenger events that signal failures cascading into catastrophe.
How Does It Work?
Have you finally reached a point where you're willing to embrace the scary but staggering truth that an obscenely expensive ERP system, implemented poorly, will not transform your business at light speed and fix all the ills that have been years in the making?
If so, let's talk.
Equipping with a Train-the-Trainer Model
What Are Your Profits Worth?
Messenger Events via McGuffey's Reader
Business Intimacy Principles:
- Risk Reduction Messenger Events are Everywhere: Transforming Complexity into Clarity with Structured Dialog.
- Risk Reduction/Clarity Improvement is Management: Clarity brings understanding. People make timely decisions when they understand what to do.
- Transparent Conversations: What's it worth to have people tell you what you need to hear rather than what they think you want to hear? Structured dialog that embraces radical openness to ridiculous, unreasonable and irrational questions drives clarity across the board.
- Innovation Accounting: To deliver exponential risk reductions and to hold leaders accountable, we need a new kind of accounting that clearly demonstrates the value of spending to make
nothing
happen. - Build-Measure-Learn: The fundamental activity of risk reduction is to save lives, money & resources so more of them can turn insights into product advantages, measure by better listening and learn where and when to turn, according to market conditions. All operational improvements should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.
Catastrophic risk reduction can be engineered by following the process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.- Matt Weilert
Equipping with a Train-the-Trainer Model
STI serves organizational leaders. Does your company have what it takes to qualify as a Systemkey™ member-client?
We provides businesses and the people who run them, with guided assessments that help lead organizations through exponential improvements in their risk signature. Unlike a consulting firm, we equip and empower participants with software, tools, techniques and an extensible train-the-trainer model so that all the companies in your entire value chain can benefit, for beyond-the-enterprise risk management—without our continuous involvement!
Our software is the least important aspect of our solution. If that scares you, we understand. Transparency can be terrifying for those who are too comfortable with yesterday's standards of performance. It just means they're part of the 85% who are still on the journey to where they are ready to implement a Systemkey™-calibre solution. There are 150+ competitors who will gladly sell you software so you can tick the box
and move on. Before you do though, perhaps you should consider Air France's experience on flight 447. Commentary from: ABC News (US), New Scientist (UK), Smithsonian (US).
Cut From a Different Bolt of Cloth
For decades, well before our founding, Ricardo Semler (Semco) and Bill Gore (Gore-Tex®) have provided dozens of real world examples in both industry and education of the power of participative management. For leaders and the people they serve, solutions powered by Systemkey™ leverage the abilities of those with the humble maturity to recognize the journey of learning never ends.
We use the umbrella term business intimacy
(twitter hashtag #bizint) to capture the entire fabric of business activity that is tailored person-to-person.
It's not a suit you can buy off the rack.
How to scale?
is so often asked by widget-mongers who want to deliver a solution driven by OPM: other people's money. OPM decisions rarely have the client or whole-system considerations foremost and often turn out as laughable as the facebook IPO.
What Are Your Profits Worth?
How much would it be worth to quell the raging fear that you've got people fully capable of pulling the next global über-gaffe? Our risk discovery suite makes the invisible visible, so you can not only see what you are paying for, you can see what you are paying to avoid!
We bring the whole brain of your whole workforce to bear on company-to-company risks across your entire value chain, so what gets solved stays solved. As companies mature in the dialog model powered by Systemkey™, they increase their capacity for innovation, problem solving and a host of other benefits.
Interested in some chronic boredom? (The kind when things just hum along.) Want to stay off 60 Minutes? Let's talk.
Our Solution Includes:
- Red Sky™ Risk Suite 1.6
- Semantic Compression™ Risk Discovery
- Both powered by the xml-based Systemkey™ risk modeling language.
Red Sky™ at morning…
Sailor take warning. That age-old ditty distills timeless wisdom about wind, sea & sky plus advanced atmospherics and the shape of our planet-all in a simple, memorable phrase.
Clarity trumps complexity.
When asked about the skills they most needed in their firms over the next five years, 1500+ global managers responded — by a 3:1 margin(!) — that cross-disciplinary insight was the talent most required to conquer the complexity of their businesses.
Semantic Compression™ is our proprietary collection of steps for purposefully collecting unstructured data in a structured environment. Interested? Let's talk.
For governance, risk and compliance (grc), no other tool scales like Red Sky™ 1.6 Risk Suite. No other risk suite scales to capture vital messenger events (that foretell catastrophes) at both ends of the spectrum: the level of the individual tree and that of the entire forest.
The reason we require organizations to qualify is simple. We care far too deeply about the real people whose job it is to protect others, to tell them that the latest shiny object will make their severe process gaps and personnel tarpits magically go away.
Because other grc tools collapse reality (eliminate or neglect detail) to match the tool, the results obtained have the same lack of fidelity to real world results as the inputs.
Systems Modeling
The heart of the Systemkey™ framework is a comprehensive, robust systems modeling language.
- Software-centric folks find it helpful to think of it just
like Java, Python and php are programming languages. - Science types gain insight by recognizing that the language
uses a simple four-base model, similar to the DNA in every cell of
our bodies. Out of stunning simplicity arises breathtaking complexity. - Linguists like to view it as having a rigid syntax (the five layers
of questions) with flexible grammar.
The Systemkey™ Risk Modeling Language is well-suited for:
- assessing innovation risk
- both intra- and inter-company risk discovery & assessment
seeing the forest for the trees
clarity in complexity.
Our Semantic Compression™ process is the McGuffey's Reader for learning to recognize the messenger events
that are present in every business, every day. The National
Park Service website for the Gateway Arch (Jefferson Expansion Memorial) has an article remarking that these timeless tomes have sold over 120 million copies and are still in print today.
