What is Systems Thinking?

Key Takeaways

let's do a little myth busting about systems thinking what systems thinking is not is just about being organized can i add a plus b plus c plus d it's definitely a piece of systems thinking but it goes much further system thinking is not thinking systematically so if i were to think systematically through 10 different subsystems of a vehicle and for each of those subsystems i would ask the question of what is the noise contribution to the overall vehicle in this subsystem and i would sort of add the noise for those different subsystems up that would certainly be thinking systematically through the vehicle i'd be going through an enumerated or complete list of all the subsystems but what's fundamentally missing is i'm not thinking about the vehicle as a system i'm not thinking about it as a whole and having some behavior or properties or functionality that must be treated holistically at the top level rather than at the decomposed level let me define a system as a set of pieces that have relationships which performs a function so i could talk about three bricks sitting on a table are these a system well do they have some relationship between them not necessarily i could talk about three subsystems of an aircraft the wing the fuselage and the engines do they have some shared function yes flying people from a to b what i need to add to my definition of systems is that the pieces and their relationships work to produce some functionality or performance that is greater than the parts individually and i'm going to call that emergence what does this mean in terms of systems thinking it means that i'm going to take a series of blocks and i'm going to analyze well what are all the blocks that are in the system what are all their relationships and how do we use the knowledge of the blocks and the relationships in order to understand what kind of emergence i'm likely to see out of it it's kind of like playing a chess game you really have to think 10 moves ahead it starts with what is this invention going to be used for what's its purpose and then it moves into how are we going to assemble the pieces and parts to make it work and then eventually how will we build it how will we be able to make it work continuously it's really seeing the whole chessboard during that creative inventive process that's systems thinking