BEHAVIOR OVER TIME GRAPHS

Behavior over time (BOT) graphs are a kind of systems thinking tool. Like other basic graphs, they have horizontal and vertical axes, with a line showing how something is changing over time. You draw a BOT graph in order to depict patterns of behavior that you want to explore from a systems thinking perspective. For example, you might want to show changes in your company's sales over the past, say, five years—as well as future sales patterns that you'd like or expect to see happen.

BOT graphs often reveal "signature" patterns of behavior that indicate that a particular systemic process is at work. For instance, suppose your company makes a cell phone with snazzy new features on it. If your graph of the sales history of this product shows sales increasing dramatically and then leveling off, then perhaps your product is experiencing market saturation—e.g., everyone who wants one of these phones has bought one. This is a common eventual constraint on the sales growth of a hot new product.

You can also graph more than one thing on a BOT graph, which helps you see how the two things might be related. To illustrate, suppose you graphed your cell-phone sales history and the number of dollars spent on marketing for that product. You might come up with a graph that looks like this:



This graph vividly shows how a rise in investment in marketing a product might be contributing to a jump in sales of that product.

BOT graphs also encourage you to think about what time frame to use in your analysis. For example, if it typically takes several years to develop a new product, you wouldn't want to graph "number of new products developed" over the course of just a few quarters—you'd want to extend that horizontal axis of your graph to include plenty of product-development cycles, perhaps six or 10 years' worth to start seeing patterns.

Though they might seem simple at first, BOT graphs let you form some theories about why things might be happening as they are in your organization. And once you form some theories, you have a much better chance of testing them—and possibly turning around some of the more troubling patterns!

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