The Art Of Thinking In Systems

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 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.

Why is thinking in systems useful?

Systems thinking helps us look at the world in a new way because it encourages

us to look at events and patterns by focusing on the connection and relationship

between a system’s parts, instead of only looking at the individual parts in

isolation. Systems thinking leads us away from trying to come up with a quick

fix to a problem, which we too often do, in favor of considering the long-term

consequences our actions may cause. It supports a deeper level of understanding

than we typically take the time to seek.

Systems thinking is a paradigm shift from our more traditional thinking patterns

because we have been taught to look at things rationally, and to try to look for

clear cause and effect connections. We are now used to trying to study things in

small, digestible pieces, and to attempting to solve problems as quickly as

possible by taking control of situations around us. Quite often, we focus on

external sources as the cause of all of our problems instead of looking internally

at our systems to see what improvements can be made.

Western culture tends to look for a problem’s cause as coming from outside of

our systems, instead of within. There are times throughout our history when this

worldview has proven very effective. Many big problems have been solved by

looking outward, like finding cures and vaccines for deadly diseases, finding

ways to produce enough food to feed the people of the world, and developing

mass transportation systems. The problem is that when we fail to take the time to

examine our internal systems as well, sometimes our solutions create new

problems. These problems can be significant, serious, and very hard to

overcome, if they are really ingrained in the structure of a system.

While that traditional method of analysis may be helpful at times, it can’t help us

to solve every problem we face despite all of our best efforts. War, harm caused

to our environment, people suffering from drug addiction, people who are

unemployed or living in poverty, and many life-threatening diseases are all

examples of problems that remain despite years of analysis and technological

advances. These problems persist because they are systems problems. No one

wanted to create them and everyone wants them to be solved, but they won’t be

until we take a good, hard look at the structures of the systems they are part of.

Instead of looking to assign blame as to what caused the problem, we need to

roll up our sleeves and dive deeper to find a solution. The solutions are within

our reach if we are willing to do what is necessary to find them. We need to be

willing to look at things from a whole new perspective. This book is all about

showing us a different way of seeing and thinking about the world and

everything in it.

That’s why systems thinking is so vitally important. Some problems are systems

problems. No matter what we do, these problems simply won’t go away though

linear or event oriented thinking. After all, it has been said the definition of

insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different

results. There is nothing wrong with linear thinking. There is a time and a place for it, for sure. It has served us well on countless occasions throughout human

history. Thinking in systems just gives us a more complex and complete picture

of events.

As we have discussed previously, systems thinking doesn’t immediately come

easily to most people and it takes time to develop this skill and adopt the new

way of seeing the world until it becomes an automatic habit. In fact, up to 95%

of our population is unable to think in systems. They focus on searching for a

simple cause and effect connection when it comes to solving problems. The

difficulty lies in that it simply won’t give a complete and accurate view of the

problem, and it is ineffective in solving systemic issues.

Systems thinking allows us to reclaim our instinct about whole systems while we

strengthen our abilities to understand their parts and how they are

interconnected. Thinking in systems enables us to ask “what-if” questions about

the behaviors we may see in the future, and gives us license to be bold enough to

unleash our creativity when it comes to redesigning our systems. We begin to

come up with solutions that would never have crossed our minds before.

Systems thinking gives us a complete picture by allowing us to examine the

interconnected relationships between the system’s components instead of only

looking at them as independent individual parts. It brings to mind an activity I

did with my kids when they were little. I blindfolded them and set out bowls of

ingredients on the kitchen counter, telling them we were going to work on a

project together. I asked them to feel the items one by one and tell me what they

thought we were going to do. When they felt the licorice, they thought it might

be a pencil. After feeling the gumdrops, they thought they were marshmallows,

and that either rice Krispy treats or hot chocolate were in their very near future.

The gumballs threw them again, as they believed they might be marbles and part

of a game we would play together. They were torn between thinking that the

icing was either toothpaste or the shaving cream that we practice spelling words

in. I chuckled all along at where their imaginations were taking them with each

item they touched. Even though they were blindfolded, I could see that my kids

were confused. They were trying to see how everything might fit together, but

by only being introduced to the parts one at a time, they had too limited

information to draw any reasonable conclusions from. After I was finished

torturing my children by keeping them in suspense far longer than they liked, I

removed their blindfolds and revealed the activity they were about to enjoy:

making gingerbread houses. Finally they understood how everything was

connected, and it all made perfect sense.

The fun I had with my kids can teach us a lesson about systems thinking. It is

impossible to know the behavior of a system just by knowing the parts that make

up that system. We have to dig deeper to understand the relationships between

those parts and the impact they have on the system as a whole. That is a central

tenant of systems thinking, and one we should never ignore.

No one thinking method is better than the others. There are times and places to

use them all. Systems thinking is not better than linear thinking. They are both

necessary for us to see and appreciate the world around us completely and in all

its complexity. Trying to only use one way of thinking is like going through the

world with one eye closed. It distorts our perception and limits what we can

accomplish. All ways of thinking are necessary in order for us to get the whole

picture.