Nayima - Systems Thinking

What is Systems Thinking?

"The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge and "Quality Software Management 1: Systems Thinking" by Gerald Weinberg describe the use of "Systems Thinking". This technique can help us to understand complex systems or situations better by looking beyond simple cause and effect.

Systems thinking results

Systems Thinking helps us to examine situations and events, by making models ("diagram of effects") that explain why things happen the way they do. We learn to see the relationships between actors, events and situations. Often, we will discover non-obvious consequences of certain actions, making us look further than the immediate future, to take the longer term into account. Of course, we must always verify if the model is a useful reflection of what we observe. We continuously test and refine our models.

Many systems contain loops, where certain events will feed back upon themselves. This leads to accelerating changes (either "exploding" or "crashing") or dampening effects. These loops are what make many systems complex and dynamic. Many systems seem to have chaotic behaviour.

When we "understand" how the system works, we can try to effect changes in these systems. We do this by finding "leverage points", places where we can have an effect and where our efforts will not be undone by the rest of the system. Again, this is a continuous process of experimentation, verification and improving our understanding of the system.

An introductory text

"Bob the project manager thinks about systems" is a short and simple introduction to the subject. It tells the story of Bob the project manager who, with the help of his mentor Jinnie, learns to apply Systems Thinking to the situations he encounters as a project manager. It touches on most elements of systems thinking: finding observable values, finding relationships, looking for long-term effects and loops and verifying models with reality. Bob soon finds out reality is not as simple as his models...

Further reading