what is systems thinking? [Learn from the mistakes of others]

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What is systems thinking?

Ever heard the expression: 'The whole is greater than the sum of the parts'?

Systems thinking enables you to grasp and manage situations of complexity and uncertainty in which there are no simple answers. It's a way of 'learning your way towards effective action' by looking at connected wholes rather than separate parts. It's sometimes called practical holism. "Systems thinking is the key literacy that we need for the future."

This is one of the main tenets of practical holism which draws on Systems Thinking and Systems Practice to understand complexity and manage change.

When you encounter situations which you experience as complex, or just plain messy, then Systems Thinking can be used to understand the situation systemically. This helps you to see the big picture, to see the connectivity between elements in the situation, so as to achieve joined-up actions.

http://www.open2.net/systems/thinking/

Mood::

hopeful

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There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

This idea is at least a quarter of a century old. Also know as synergetics and xeteticism. If you want to see the evolution of it look up some of the stuff from the Foresight Institute (Eric Drexler's think tank). While the nanotech research they do is interesting, their research into the philosophy and evolution of systems is lots more interesting (at least to me).

Have a Rationality Token on me (good for one trip on the Boston subway in an emergency).

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And is it just me, or did my buzz-words alarm start ringing rather loudly when reading this entry.

<grin>

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Somebody will pay for having invented those "word-a-day" calendars...

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you offering to buy me one? ;P

i've been making do with my impractical education ... and this doorstop of a book-thing™ here ...

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i've had a bit of a dig about in a library place to find out what this stuff is all about. coz i'm curious like that, and have some idea what i'm supposed to do that way.

i'm less inclined to agree with the person who suggested this idea to me. the content and so forth of of what systems thinking is actually about seems quite mechanistic to me. all those diagrams and stuff seem like a neat idea, but they're really just trying to reduce everything to neat diagrams and such.

and kant was a boring fart.

i've just realised that i've been skimming my way through some fifty years or so of "management theory" guff ... getting a sense of just how pointless a lot of it really is. and why so many mba's can't relate to the "real world" that everyone else lives in.

everyone is out to either prove they can string sentences together using the neato codewords for this season's managerial fashions, or how clever they are at using different jargony words to say the same thing, only different like.

and when i do find something interesting, it's also couched in stupidly impenetrable new jargon. yippie!

there are som cool ideas out there, but everyone wants to be "taken seriously" - and that supposedly means they need to write tomes filled with "management speak".

[i'm quite aware of the use of jargon to identify one's memebership of a particular profession. i have several chunky dictionaries and some wallpaper to show for myself :P]

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