"Systems Thinking" is a thing, for sure, but when I speak of systems thinking, I'm not talking about any specific or opinionated definition of the term. My objective is to approach a complex and abstract set of concepts broadly, with intent and deep focus.
The hope is to achieve a deep enough understanding of the topics to begin to articulate and find new ways to apply them. This stuff can be mind bending at times, and I'm trying to avoid biasing my thinking by applying a vocabulary too soon.
So maybe a better name for this pillar of the ontology could have been "Systematic Thinking" in terms of my ultimate goals, as I'm essentially trying to externalize a way of seeing the world that is structured, observable, describable, repeatable, and hopefully at some point usable on some level.
From a meta-cognitive standpoint, I "get" most of this stuff as I've been absorbing all of the literature on the subject I could possibly get my hands on for the better part of 25 years. But I admit that as part of this exercise I found that I do not know the source material and thinking as well as I need or would like to.
The uncomfortable truth, for me at least, is that it's just really, really hard to find others with a deep enough understanding to help me reflect on, and ultimately understand myself, what I feel are scattered pockets of knowledge that are right on the cusp of being explainable in a unified way across many domains.
In other words, I don't really know what I know or don't know at this point in time and am still trying to find that footing.
Whereas other topics in my ontology may be more built out and structured, my approach to Systems Thinking is more to reach a baseline of knowledge that I feel I should possess in order to speak intelligently about, and ultimately apply, the various concepts or domains that represent deep, structural, and holistic systematic thinking.
Thinking in Systems
I've got a mind, I've got half a mind...to shut down the whole system at the spine with fishing line.
Built to Spill “Stab” (1994)
My fascination with "systems thinking" officially started with the classic Dana Meadows book Thinking in Systems, but I remember being introduced to adjacent concepts such as "chaos" in distributed systems as far back as middle school, through themes that emerged in the dystopian worlds of William Gibson books like Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
I see the "hidden" structures that underly just about everything, and I apply various "systems thinking" concepts to my methodology and approach to solving complex problems, but to try and find the right words to describe what I "see" is one of the most difficult thinking or writing challenges I've ever taken on.
At its core, systems thinking is about making sense of whole systems and all of the moving pieces that make them up, and how those pieces relate to and interact with each other in ways that influence or change the properties or observable behaviors of the system.
This is how I am currently seeing the concept of Systems Thinking breaking down in terms of what I know and what I want to know better:
- Assemblage Theory - This is new to me. I only learned about the concept of complex wholes that emerge from heterogenous components recently while watching an online event with Dave Snowden, and I can't lie - anything with concepts with names like "territorialization" and "deterritorialization" sounds pretty 🔥 to me. (Notice I just used an emoji - dead giveaway that this is all written by AI in case you were wondering)
- Complexity Science - This is where I see core, cross-cutting concepts such as adaptive and self-organizing systems, nonlinearity, and emergent properties stemming from in my mind. I also place "Chaos Theory" within Complexity Science, which was the first foray I made into the concept of systems thinking about 35 years ago.
- Cybernetics - "Cybernetics" is a term I had heard many times before, but had zero idea what it meant. In fact, I think at one point I even conflated it with Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard (don't ask). I only really started digging deeper as I started to think about how biological concepts such as homeostasis and self-regulation could apply to digital systems. While Cybernetics stems from the work of Norbert Wiener, discovering the unique writing style of a dude with the most steampunk-sounding name ever of R. Buckminster Fuller finally pulled me down the rabbit hole.
- Lean Systems Thinking - While I did learn the core concepts of Lean many moons ago when I went through my process engineering phase, I didn't want to just rehash Lean in the ontology given it was boring as a standalone topic then and it's just as boring now. But Lean principles such as the flow of value and the elimination of waste are applicable across many domains, so this topic represents my approach to applying Lean to broader Systems Thinking concepts.
- Network Theory - One of my first big jobs in IT decades ago was designing Local (LAN) and Wide Area Networks (WAN). Then came this Internet thing and the concept of an interconnected global network absolutely blew my mind. As I recently took the time to familiarize myself with Network Theory, concepts such as Graph Theory and Small World Networks really took me back to the days of designing large scale data networks. Ah, the sweet smell of nostalgia in the evening. These days I apply Network Theory concepts to human, digital, and conceptual networks to understand how to better design robustness and resiliency into networked concepts and systems.
- Sensemaking - In my mind, Sensemaking (or Sense-making) bridges the gap between what we know and what we feel we know. It describes the processes in which we derive meaning from our collective experiences, and how we fill in the gaps to form cohesive models of the world. What stories do we tell, and how do we collectively recognize patterns?
- Socio-Technical Systems Design - I am a systems guy, but people are at the heart of everything I do. Integrating the needs, expectations and behaviors of humans with the design of technical systems is an incredibly complex concept that I work to get better at daily. Like Tron, I fight for the users.
- Synergetics - I know very little about Synergetics, and honestly it sounded like something made up by a management consulting firm to brand their flavor of digital transformation or something dumb like that. However, when I dug into it I found some interesting parallels with the physical sciences about the emergence of patterns or structures, which prompted me to think of how these could apply to digital or conceptual systems and their design.
- Systems Change Theory - At the end of the day, we can design the most elegant and beautiful systems in the world, but without implementing them, these designs are just hopeful ideals. As someone who has been implementing systems for over 30 years, I think it's safe to say that as systems and the human requirements for these systems has increased, the complexity involved with making changes to said systems has also increased...and in many cases, exponentially.
- Systems Theory - This represents the heart of everything related to my conceptual understanding of systems thinking, or at least the mental framework that I have developed around concepts such as how everything connects and works together as a whole, and how system behavior can be observed and influenced through feedback loops and exploiting leverage points within a system. I view Systems Theory as kind of a grand unifying theory of everything.
- Theory of Constraints (ToC) - I was introduced to Theory of Constraints by way of The Goal, an admittedly dry "business novel" from one of the greatest systematic thinkers of the past century, Eliyahu Goldratt. The incredible simplicity of the concept of finding and managing bottlenecks in a process continues to pervade my thinking decades later. Goldratt, Dr. Michael Hammer, and Tom Davenport represent the original and lasting influences on my systemic design thinking, with ToC being the conceptual glue that I apply to all systems analysis and design.
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