Systems Thinking

Excerpt From - The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge (1)

A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain.  We also note that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow.  All these events are distinct in time and space, yet they all connected within the same pattern.  Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view.  You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.

Business and other human endeavors are also systems.  They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other.  Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change.  Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.  Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past 50 years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

Though the tools are new, the underlying worldview is extremely intuitive; experiments with young children show that they the learn systems thinking very quickly." (1)

These are the subheadings of the chapter that deals with the laws of systems thinking.

1.  Today's problems, from yesterday's solutions.

2.  The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

3.  Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

4.  The easy way out usually leads back in.

5.  The cure can be worse than the disease.

6.  Faster is slower.

7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

8.  Small changes can produce big results-but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

9.  You can have your cake and eat it too-but not at once.

10.  Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

11.     There is no blame.

(1) The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge, ©1990 Doubleday