Learn from the mistakes of others

apparently, i'm a natural 'at' systems thinking. which is news to me, and not so much.

it amuses me that there are all kinds of journals, books and blogs about thinking systemically. all manner of 'how to's and training programs and so forth.

amusing because so much of it is about tools and processes and stuff for thinking about how you think about a system. now, i value reflection. it's a great way to pick apart a problem, and to understand how - and perhaps why - you do something in a particular way. perhaps it's the aspie in me, but when it comes to problems, i find it much more effective to think about possible solutions rather than thinking about how i'm thinking about how to solve a problem. it's a bit late to be doing that when you're supposed to be doing, i would have thought ...

perhaps if more time and effort went into learning thinking skills during school, grown ups wouldn't be fussing about with learning them as adults. this is not to say that one cannot, or should not, refine and develop your thinking as an adult. but it seems bizarre to me that it is a novel thing to learn about drawing cycles, and flowcharts and suchlike. that understanding a system might require learning something about its' components and how they relate to one another. even better, learning and remembering and applying that knowledge.


if more people did that kind of thing, we might have less of this kind of crap about the place: "Organizational Learning is the end of the war between thinking and doing."

give me a break!