Connection Circles: How To Know What Caused What

Connection circles are thinking tools made for thinking through actions and consequences. They help you understand the causal links between choices and repercussions. This is why they are sometimes seen as a simplified version of a causal loop diagram. Connection circles can reveal feedback loops and cause-and-effect relationships you would have otherwise overlooked. Put differently, they are tools for visualizing relationships in a story or system. Perhaps the best part is how easy and time-efficient they are.

Take an example: your new window-cleaning service has been dealing with unhappy customers. They have sent complaints and you’ve heard all about it: your workers leave stains, the pricing exceeds the quality of the service, and when asked for support, none was provided. These are the elements of your connection circle: cleaning quality, worker demeanor, customer satisfaction, support, and pricing. Now you document the relationships between the variables. Quality means higher customer satisfaction, but it also increases price. Improved employee demeanor results in customer satisfaction and support, but might result in higher pricing—due to training costs.

On and on you go until each element connects nicely to one another, providing you with data for further action. The better you understand the system as a whole, the more intimate you will be with your priorities. In this case, training or hiring new talent or increasing prices in honor of quality would probably be the go-to. These visual diagrams focus you on how various factors influence one another and the whole. Connection circles underscore feedback loops, leverage points, and interdependencies. You can then interpret and analyze this web of relationships that drive the system.

Don’t let the simple idea discourage you. Visualizing a system in the form of a circle with nodes emphasizes you to think systematically. Not linearly. This is key for understanding systems: cause-and-effect relationships are typically cyclical, interdependent, and interconnected. A change in one variable can—and often does—ripple through the system. The benefits of such a visualization are great: a holistic understanding of the system as a whole rather than isolated parts; identifying critical variables that, when influenced, result in significant system-wide repercussions; facilitating collaboration since the results can be easily presented to stakeholders or team members. Using them is really a no-brainer.

Real-world applications of connection circles:

• Business: use by identifying how market trends, internal processes, and customer experience interact; the benefit being the ability to identify areas where strategic interventions can result in a big overall impact;

• Organization: analyzing factors that affect employee morale can unveil hidden feedback loops that hinder performance, such as low morale influencing customer service, which in turn worsens conversion rates and sales, and that leaves a smaller budget for employee incentives, forming a loop;

• Public policy: understanding the interrelation between economic, social, and environmental variables helps policymakers develop more holistic, effective interventions that address systemic issues rather than surface-level symptoms;

• Health: mapping lifestyle factors that contribute to physical or mental health acts as an aid for visualizing the key habits or stressors that, when modified, can significantly impact well-being;

• Education: analyzing how different teaching modalities, student engagement, and academic outcomes interact can help a mentor or teacher devise an effective tutoring strategy for their learners by understanding which factors most positively influence learning.

How to use connection circles as a thinking tool: (1) draw a circle on a blank page; (2) list out key variables, the primary factors that influence the system you are analyzing, such as customer satisfaction, product quality, employee morale, sales revenue, and market competition in business; (3) place each variable at the perimeter of the circle; (4) draw causal links, connecting the variables with arrows indicating the direction of influence, like one from employee morale to sales revenue—suggesting that more motivated employees are better salespeople—and use plus or minus signs to indicate whether the relationship leads to an increase or a decrease; (5) identify feedback loops, looking for cycles where variables influence each other in a cycle fashion, such as customer satisfaction positively affecting sales revenue, which in turn can be reinvested into product quality, for a boost in customer satisfaction, and so on; (6) analyze leverage points, the variables that, if changed, would have the largest impact on the system as a whole.

Yes they are simple. No they aren’t useless. Connection circles are a powerful thinking tool for understanding and analyzing cause-and-effect relationships. Visualize those variables. See how they talk to each other. Using this tool as a decision-maker in business, investing, policy, or even personal domains, you’ll become more informed and accurate. Address both immediate issues and systemic dynamics this way! Else you might have to go back and patch things up.