2. Systems thinking is a way of understanding reality that emphasizes the relati

Question

2. Systems thinking is a way of understanding reality that emphasizes the relationships among a system's parts, rather than the parts themselves. a) What does this mean? b) Why is Systems Thinking needed? c) What works against the adoption of Systems Thinking? 3. Systems thinking focuses more on the system rather than on the actions of individual engineers or others involved with the system. This allows us to learn how to redesign a failed system from design to operation. How can we apply systems thinking to learn from failures such as the Challenger accident to reduce incidents and accidents?

Explanation / Answer

1)System thinking is a method of critical thinking by which you analyze the relationships between the system's parts in order to understand a situation for better decision-making. In simpler terms, you look at a lot of the trees, other plants and critters living around the trees, the weather, and how all these parts fit together in order to figure out the forest.

System thinking is a major departure from the old way of business decision-making in which you would break the system into parts and analyze the parts separately. Supporters of system thinking believe that the old way is inadequate for our dynamic world, where there are numerous interactions between the parts of a system, creating the reality of a situation. According to system thinking, if we examine the interactions of the parts in a system, we will see larger patterns emerge. By seeing the patterns, we can begin to understand how the system works. If the pattern is good for the organization, we can make decisions that reinforce it; but if the pattern is bad for the organization, we can make decisions that change the pattern.

2)When thinking about the sort of problems that are characteristic for our time, systems thinking brings us from the realm of hopeless problems to the realm of opportunities and solutions; this is because it's the systems that are producing the problems; trying to wrestle those same systems to solve them tends to be futile; aiming to improve the systems (i.e. looking at systemic problems) reveals opportunities for constructive action and betterment of conditions.

3)

The reason why organizations don’t adopt systems thinking is more specific to systems thinking itself. Systems thinking is simply not approachable. It’s abstract, vague and hard to grasp.

“We are an introverted profession. We do most of our writing and speaking to each other”, writes Ackoff. The things systems thinkers discuss amongst themselves bear no resemblance of applicability or usefulness to those outside the circle.

Why couldn’t systems thinking simply be a little more concrete? Because the solutions are always context-specific. They can not be applied in other domains directly without understanding the systems of the new domain. Doling out concrete actions for a complex system you haven’t studied would be unprofessional.

Someone sharing “best practices of systems thinking” either has not understood a single thing about systems thinking or is so advanced others should just stop trying.

We can, of course, bring out examples of context-specific solutions. They can’t be copied, but they can be learned from.

We can help people start to see systems. As most systems thinkers know, once you start seeing them, you can’t stop seeing them.

We can help people get started with experimentation. It’s not just systems thinking, but systems acting.

4)Systems thinkers always seemed to understand more of the world than I did. That’s what sparked my interest towards systems thinking. I too wanted to understand the world like they did.

5)Systems thinking has been defined as an approach to problem solving that attempts to balance holistic thinking and reductionistic thinking. By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences.

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