Another part of systems thinking I’m teaching is my rules of flow. As I was planning the presentation, I noticed that my change bowl—a broad, ceramic bowl where I place the spare change that’s in my pocket at the end of the day—was spilling over with heaped-up change. $50 had probably accumulated within it.
That’s happened before. Our grocery store has a machine where you can dump your loose change in and the store will give back a percentage of its value. I’m a frugal, full-value guy so I would never use such a machine, but it’s an indicator that other households also have overflowing change bowls. Every time my change bowl overflows, I start putting a handful of change into my pocket and make payments with change. If something is $3.78, I pay it all in loose change. When the bowl becomes half empty, I start forgetting and change begins to accumulate once again.
So my change bowl could be a good example for my students of the rule of flow that if inflow is greater than outflow, the stock accumulates. This led me to think more deeply about change bowls. Why does the change accumulate?
The change bowl is where I park the change from my pockets at the end of the day when I hang up my pants. Why do I take the change out? Because some days the pants go into the laundry or the pants get hung in a way that the change falls out. Way back in time, I learned to take the change out of my pocket when I get undressed for bed. So a few times each week, change inflows as small amounts (usually less than a dollar).
In the morning, I put my wallet in my pocket. And my car keys. But I don’t put change in my pocket because it’s a new day. Change isn’t something you put in your pocket. It’s something that accumulates in your pocket during the day. It’s something you get, not something you take. And that’s when I realized the fundamental nature of the change bowl. It has no outflow. It looks like it does; the change is just sitting, ready for the taking. But in action, nothing flows out until it is overflowing. Once I realized that, the solution appeared. Transform my image of loose change to that of a tool I put into my pocket each morning, just like my wallet. It doesn’t need to be a handful. A pinch will do.
Two things happen when I start putting a pinch of change in my pocket. The first is that change flows out as I use it to pay with exact change. If something is $3.78, I’ll give the cashier a $5 bill plus seventy-eight cents in change. That is seventy-eight cents that has flowed out of my change bowl and onward to someplace else. But the second, more wondrously subtle effect is that change stops flowing in – because I am paying the change part exactly, I stop getting change given back to me. Each morning I take a pinch of change out of the bowl; each evening I put a smaller pinch back in. My bowl is half empty and slowly, steadily dropping. A time will come when my change bowl turns into something small, just a nightly parking place for twenty or so coins.
Meanwhile, in class, if I have to make an arbitrary decision, I tell my class that I’ll just reach in to “my pinch of change” to get a coin to flip and they all smile, remembering my change bowl and the rules of flow. I occasionally bring in the bowl so they can see the level dropping. And the phrase “pinch of change” gives a certain British properness bit of fun to putting it into my pocket each morning.
P.S. Back when I would deal with my change bowl’s overflow by periodically loading my pocket with a heaping handful of change, I found that cashiers often expressed gratitude for the change because they have the opposite problem. The change that accumulates in change bowls has been drained out of cash register drawers. Several times a day, the cashiers have to sign out more rolls of change because we pay in twenty-dollar bills, not a twenty plus the amount of change. Because many of us don’t put a pinch of change into our pocket each morning, precious metals are turned into tons of extra coins that are cycled around by armored trucks so that tons of metal can accumulate in millions of change bowls.
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