Seeing Systems Clearly: A Visual-Spatial Take on Leadership and Ethics
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.” — W. Edwards Deming
I don’t think in snapshots.
I think in movies—in motion. People, information, pressure all flowing within a system, all at once.
My mind runs the simulation automatically. From any point, I can see what that person in the system sees, sense where energy flows—or doesn’t. It’s like living inside the process itself.
That’s what it’s like to be a high-spatial thinker. I probably think differently than you. Most people use a verbal-linear mode of reasoning without even noticing it. Many visual-spatial thinkers can build complex things in their minds, seeing the finished object in 3-D before it exists. My gift is a little different—I don’t construct objects; I inhabit systems.
When I walk into a warehouse, a production line, or a leadership meeting, everything animates. Lines of communication, stress points, and unspoken rules come alive like current running through the wiring. I can feel where the flow is smooth and where it wobbles. When the story a company tells about itself doesn’t match what’s actually happening on the floor, the dissonance shows up instantly—like gears grinding under load.
Why My Writing Sounds So Critical
People sometimes say my essays are hard on management.
They’re not wrong.
But I’m not angry. I’m just describing what I see.
What looks like criticism is really diagnostics—mapping the spots where the story and the system part ways.
When a company claims it is “people first” but designs every process around throughput first, that’s not philosophy; that’s physics. Systems either align or they don’t. Respect and dignity aren’t slogans—they’re a real part of the operating system. Remove or diminish them and performance starts to rattle. Costs increase. Control fails.
I don’t write to scold; I write because ignoring that kind of friction feels dishonest. Once you see how easily harm moves through an organization, pretending it’s invisible feels like lying to yourself.
How My ‘High Spatial’ Brain Works
Researchers talk about two main kinds of visual-spatial thinkers:
Object visualizers—they see vivid, detailed images.
Spatial visualizers—they see relationships and motion.
I’m firmly in the second camp. My cognition is kinetic. (If you want the research, check out Maria Kozhevnikov and Mary Hegarty’s work on spatial visualization. They explain it well.)
I don’t just see where people stand in a company org chart; I see how communication and trust flow between them, how decisions ripple, how pressure looks and feels when it travels across a network. Once real, human empathy gets squeezed out of a process, it shows up immediately—conversation slows, initiative dies, the system starts squeaking like an ungreased wheel.
What I Actually See
Every organization runs two systems at once:
The declared system – the values, vision statements, and leadership slogans.
The lived system – the one people experience at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.
Most of the dysfunction hides in the gap between them.
That’s where good intentions get lost in translation, where a “people-first” policy quietly becomes a “numbers-first” habit. Even if the dashboards glow green, the engine underneath is quietly running hot.
That space—the tribal knowledge zone—is where I spend my time. I’m not seeking to name villains; I’m tracing the source of the leak. Most of what I write about culture or leadership lives right there, where the promise of dignity gets tangled in the machinery of chasing metrics. Pointing that out isn’t rebellion—it’s maintenance on the system.
Why I Can’t Keep Quiet
I don’t hunt for flaws; I just see them.
Like an engineer who hears a bad bearing, I can’t tune it out.
I’m not angry about it; I’m fascinated, sometimes a little heartbroken by what I observe. Most broken systems start with decent people who stopped listening to feedback. My instinct isn’t to burn anything down—it’s to tune it carefully until it runs the way it was meant to.
So, yes, my essays read like critiques of leadership. They are. But they come from affection for the craft. I love watching a process run cleanly. I love when words and actions finally match up. I simply have a low tolerance for hypocrisy disguised as efficiency.
The Gift (and the Curse) of Seeing Everything
The upside of this kind of mind is foresight.
I can run a process in my head like a movie and see where it stalls before it happens; then simulate the potential countermeasures. That’s a super power in operations. It’s less fun when everyone’s celebrating a new project’s completion and I’m already seeing the downstream jam that’s coming soon.
But this is the wiring I’ve got. I see organizations the way musicians hear rhythm—patterns, tension, release. When the beat falls off tempo, I notice. Writing is how I bring it back into time.
Why I Keep Writing
I’m not out to save the world or tear down leadership.
I’m just describing what it looks like from inside a mind that sees systems in motion. The truth is, I respect good leadership profoundly. When it works, it’s a kind of alchemy—people moving in sync, information flowing cleanly, purpose showing up in every decision.
That’s what I’m after when I write. Not outrage. System alignment.
When I point out absurd or unethical structures, I’m not swinging an axe; I’m holding up a mirror to it. The difference between a complaint and a map is intention. I’m trying to draw the map.
If that comes off as critique, so be it.
I call it preventive maintenance—for organizations, and for myself.
Author’s Note
This essay is part of Chasing Omniscience—an ongoing exploration of how systems behave, what visual-spatial thinkers see inside them, and how dignity and design intersect in everyday work. Field notes from someone who can’t stop watching the gears turn.
About the Author
Todd Owings is a Child of God, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Corporate Social Scientist, Visual Spatial Thinker & Translator, and Kinesthetic Empath based in the Chicago area. He writes about the patterns beneath operations, the culture hidden inside process maps, and the quiet mechanics of how people and systems succeed—or don’t.
For more information on High Spatial Thinking, check out:
Maria Kozhevnikov & Mary Hegarty, “Mechanisms of Visuospatial Thinking,” Cognitive Psychology, 2001.
Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking, 2022.
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind, 1983.