Idea → Value: Current Reality and Root Causes — The Full System Sessions

Editor’s Note: The Full System Sessions form the extended walkthrough of the Idea → Value lens — a detailed exploration of the principles, terminology, and practical implications of turning ideas into realised value.

A map of the essays, field guides, and studio sessions can be found here.

Principle Three — Current Reality and Root Causes

Idea → Value: The Full System Sessions

A painted picture is a gift. A future in story form.
It gives people something to walk toward. Something to see themselves anchored in – and a part of.

But it can also become a kind of daydream if we never do the second, braver thing:

stand in the present moment and face the reality and truth about where we are.

This principle is about current reality — not the version we present in slides, and not the version we wish were true, but the lived, everyday experience of how the organisation actually works – where we are right now.

A simple question opens the door:

If the future we want is so compelling, why are we not already there?

The answers are rarely comfortable, but they are useful.
They reveal the obstacles — the friction, the bottlenecks, the behaviours, the missing abilities — that sit between today and the future we claim to want.

And here is the trap many organisations fall into:

they spend their energy solving symptoms.

Interesting symptoms. Loud symptoms. Convenient symptoms. Shiny symptoms.
The kind that allow movement without requiring change. The kind that fix a problem only for the problem to return a week later.

But symptoms are often the representation of something deeper. A root cause.

So this session introduces a practical way of working out what's standing between where we are right now, and the bright future:
a root problem tree.

You gather people.
You list what is not working.
You let the mess appear.

And then you do the real work:

• spotting patterns
• distinguishing symptoms from causes
• setting aside blame, excuses, and untested opinions
• and asking for evidence — not to win arguments, but to see clearly

Done well, this process rarely produces fifty “priorities.”
It produces a handful of root causes that explain a surprising amount of the symptoms, the problems and the noise.

From there, the funnel returns (and the vending machine) — not as a delivery machine, but as a thinking tool:

we cannot fix everything, so we must choose.
We must filter.
We must invest.
We must experiment.

And eventually, the future stops being a poster on the wall,
and becomes a path the organisation is walking along.

The Studio video below explores this idea, how to keep politics out of this process and why evidence and insight are essential to grasp our current reality.