I have firstly encountered Iceberg Model somewhere on the Internet during 2017, in one of Leyla Acaroglu’s articles/blogs. It immediately made sense to me and I copied it to my notepad. In short, it’s a tool used to gain a deeper understanding of things. It illustrates that things we see or read about in newspapers (events) are only a tip of iceberg. There’s much more of iceberg under the water, just as there are things that influence things we see or read about, but are not easily visible.

source:  Leyla Acaroglu 

A few days ago I tried to find Leyla’s post, but failed. Instead, I found Systems Thinking With The Iceberg: A Tool for Multi-stakeholder System Sight which explains it nicely.

In order to help myself understand (un)employment in Bosnia and Herzegovina better, I decided to give the iceberg model a try. Here are the first results:

right click -> open image in the new tab to see full size image

EVENTS:

• Poor working conditions in industry: overtime work, irregular salaries, “bossing”, incomplete salaries at the end of the month, poor salaries…
• Employers report that high school graduates don’t have appropriate knowledge
• Employers often don’t register their employees (they usually do it later, when state offers incentives for employment)
• Enterprises can’t find workers
• Unemployed persons show poor interest for employment programs (note: high school graduates show best interest)
• Enterprises mostly need low skilled workers

PATTERNS:

• Workers are leaving B&H, especially younger people (large percentage of them is finding jobs abroad with help of Employment Offices)
• High-income families are also leaving (some of the reasons I found in interviews online are general uncertainty and lack of possibilities for professional advancement)

STRUCTURES:

• Enterprises must offer their products for low price to be competitive (since without Research&Development and final products, they don’t have many possibilities), so they are making saving by paying low salaries

MENTAL MODEL:

• Ingenuity at the expense of the state
• “If others are doing it so will I”
• “It’s better to do nothing for nothing, then to work for nothing”
• general belief that it’s a shame not to finish a college

I’m about to add more events in the next few days (or weeks), which I will use to see if there are any new patterns or structures appearing. I’m also sure some things are misplaced, but still I decided to post it. If someone who has used Iceberg model in practice and/or is interested in the same topic is reading, a comment would be great.

To be continued…