To me, “systems thinking” is just “thinking”.
If one’s thinking does not naturally lead them to identifying, observing, questioning and challenging systems, it’s likely because they’ve been conditioned to think within boxes that other people have defined for them.
You cannot really teach systems thinking in school, because children aren’t really allowed to seriously interrogate the system of school itself.
All things are understood in relation to other things. You know what is hot in relation to what is cold, what is big in relation to what is small.
Everything is made up of relationships, and everything is understood in terms of relationships.
A system is just a network of relationships. Things themselves are made up of relationships, internal and external. If you think about anything at all seriously enough, your questions inevitably lead you to becoming a “systems thinker”. It’s just thinking.
Nothing exists in isolation and nothing can be understood in isolation. Everything exists in some context. Understanding that context is about understanding the relationships between the things in that context, how changing one thing affects another.
Interestingly, delightfully, math and theatre can both be understood as the study of relationships: of how some things relate to other things, how x relates to y, how you relate to me. This is because everything is relationships, nothing exists in isolation.
But don’t take my word for it. Be curious about something. Ask questions. Why is something the way it is? What were the factors influencing that? Why did that happen and not something else? What would need to be different for something else to have happened? How?
“Systems thinking”, “design thinking”, “critical thinking” are all euphemisms to disguise the fact that people don’t actually think, because actual thinking is disruptive and inconvenient to authority.
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There is some additional nuance about the way I think about thinking, that’s probably a little different than how most people probably think about it.
To me, thinking is something you do not just in your head but “with your hands”, thinking is intertwined with action. Think-by-doing.
I oscillate between using the mainstream frame (which I think is kind of suboptimal, but it’s a little too ubiquitous to argue against) and using my own. For example, I like the riff “you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit”. You have to act. No amount of thinking will act on your behalf. Mapping a problem is not the same as addressing it.
It’s very tricky, tricksy stuff.
A, you have “total ignorance”, disengagement, apathy. B, you have ~some~ apparent knowledge, a partial map, some “self awareness”, some “situational understanding”. B is usually thought of as better than A. And it can be. But it can also be worse.
A little knowledge can be dangerous. Thinking you understand a problem can be worse than knowing that you don’t understand it. The pretense of knowledge can be ruinous. & yet to some degree there is some unknowability to all things. It’s quite complicated, hard to put in words.
This is where some of Taleb’s ideas come in quite handy. There is no point trying to perfectly understand anything, that will require perfect knowledge of everything. you are not God. You have to accept defeat in the face of chaos and randomness, and design around that.
Which is to say, you can be far more certain that something will fail eventually, than have any certainty whatsoever about how long it will last. There is an asymmetry here. Don’t make big bets that you can’t afford to lose. Run lots of cheap little experiments instead.
I’ve been giggling to myself with a thought experiment lately: imagine an advanced alien shows up and offers you a wager: will you bet that the sun will rise tomorrow? historically speaking, it always has, and we know it has enough hydrogen to last another 5.5 billion years… but who the fuck is this alien? where did he come from? what powers does he have? suppose his wager is something massive, like, “will you bet all human lives that the sun will rise tomorrow?” but how did he GET here? what if he has sun-destroying tech? or earth-abducting tech?
You’re probably not going to encounter such a malevolent trickster alien, but if you ever do I hope you think very carefully about what the fuck kinda game he’s playing with you.
See, earlier I said no pressure about thinking, feel free to think or not-think. That’s because usually your thinking or non-thinking does not have any direct impact on my life. But in this context, it does! You see how everything is context-dependent?
“All things are understood in relation to other things. You know what is hot in relation to what is cold, what is big in relation to what is small. Everything is made up of relationships, and everything is understood in terms of relationships.” This idea reminds me of Steven Hayes’ relational frame theory. He also explains how relational thinking encourages us to build conceptual networks, but when I read it, I didn’t make the connection to systems thinking.
I wonder how your conception of “think-by-doing” relates to the idea of explicit and implicit/tacit knowledges, where tacit knowledge seems like a “know-by-doing”. I like the imagery of “thinking with your hands”. I have to think with my voice and feet sometimes too — I occasionally need a pen and paper, a conversational partner, or a long walk for my brain to work.