This text is about introducing you to systems thinking. It continues from what you have learned about systems, feedback loops, and interconnections. Please check the previous links if you are not familiar with these themes before reading this text. This text gives you the rude basics of systems thinking.
You live in a complex world with lots of interactions between systems and their elements. It is hard to understand the world without systems thinking. It can be described as a typical mindset. It is used to get a big picture of your systems and how their elements produce different cause-effect relationships. Systems thinking does not work in a way that you focus on one element and forget its effects on others. This latter way of seeing things produces severe misunderstandings about the world. And systems thinking reduces the number of misunderstandings.
The world is full of systems within systems
Your skin is a system within your body which is a system too. You cannot understand your skin without understanding the interconnections between your body and your skin. When you do something to your skin, your brain reacts to your action. If you burn your finger on a stove, your brain sends a signal to remove your finger from the stove. For this to happen, your skin is a receptor of the heat which sends the signal to your brain that it has detected something that is too warm for keeping your finger on it. Without these interconnections, the skin in your finger would burn for a long time on a stove.
Systems thinking helps you to figure out the longer-term effects of the effects of your actions. It does not focus only on here and now the effects of your actions. When you do something without thinking about the longer-term effects, you can have many unintended consequences which you could prepare for, if you had used systems thinking. With systems thinking, you can have higher odds of understanding the future than without it. It also helps you to remove your focus from the causes you cannot change to causes you to have the power to change. This saves you lots of time and effort without having many negative effects. Systems thinking helps also you to make sense of the structure of your systems. It deepens your understanding of them. You can see how different elements in your system interact. When one element changes, others react to this change. Then the whole system behavior will change, at least a bit.
A process with many questions
To understand how your system works, you have to ask many questions. You have to figure out which effects are related to which causes. You cannot understand and/or improve your system without understanding what happens and why. You can also solve problems related to your system with this process. Many of the questions you ask are not related to any special system. They are the same questions, no matter what system is concerned. Problem-solving and system improvement process has three steps:
First, when you start figuring out the effects of one element, you create wider views about the element and the timeframe you focus on. You ask questions about the interactions of many elements and what the future of the system will look like. Questions, like ”How will system elements interact in the future?”, ”If I change one element, how will the other elements behave in the future?”,
Second, you start figuring out how does the system behavior arises and changes. You ask questions like, ”What are the key circumstances and how fast do they change?”, ”In what directions do the key interconnections move?”, ”Do the feedback loops in a system balance or reinforce the interactions of the system?”
The third and final step is all about improving the system. These questions focus on the simple truth that systems are almost always improvable. You can ask questions like: ”Is this system as simple as possible, but not simpler?”, ”Do I need all these elements to get what I want from the system?” or ”Can these elements be improved somehow? The question about the last step is: Does the system improvement produce better results than the time and effort you will put on it? If not, you have to focus on other things.
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