The Art Of Thinking In Systems: Improve Your Logic, Think More Critically, And Use Proven Systems To Solve Your Problems Strategic Planning For Everyday Life pdfdrive com

Chapter 1: What is Systems Thinking?
As a teacher, I often found that visual demonstrations were the best at helping
my students to understand difficult or abstract concepts. For one lesson, I
brought in a boomerang, a curved, flat piece of wood designed to be thrown and
originally used as a weapon for hunting. I opened a box containing a boomerang
and held the boomerang in my hand, walking around so that my students could
see it up close. Then I threw the boomerang. I asked my students what made the
boomerang come back to me. They unanimously thought it was me throwing the
boomerang. I told them that we would further test their theory. I held the box
that the boomerang came in and threw it the same way.
Of course, this time the box did not come back to me, but rather flew for a short
distance and dropped to the ground. We went on to discuss that it clearly was not
my hand or the way I threw the boomerang that made it behave the way it did.
When my hand released the boomerang, it freed the boomerang to operate in the
way its structure was designed to. While we were discussing a lesson on physics,
the same lesson is central to systems theory. Systems thinking allows behavior
that is already present within the structure of a system to be suppressed or
released as we study and understand systems and problems.
What is Systems Thinking?
The term “systems thinking” was coined by Barry Richmond in 1987. According
to Richmond, “Systems thinking is the art and science of making reliable
inferences about behavior by developing an increasingly deep understanding of

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underlying structure.”
[ii]

In The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, author Peter Senge
states, “Systems thinking [is] a way of thinking about, and a language for
describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the
behavior of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more
effectively, and to act more in tune with the natural processes of the natural and
economic world.”
[iii]
In order to get a better understanding of what these two experts are telling us,
let’s go back to the basics. What is a system? A system is a group of things that
are interconnected and demonstrate their own behavior pattern over time.
Systems are usually the cause of their own behavior. Even when outside forces
act on a system, it reacts in a way that is consistent with the character of the
system. If the same outside forces were to act on a different system, there would
likely be a different outcome.