Systems thinking is seeing a piece of work in terms of the whole it belongs to: the parts, the connections between them, the delays, and the effects that return to their source. It covers tracing a consequence beyond its first step, distinguishing a symptom from the structure producing it, recognising that an improvement in one part can degrade the whole, and identifying where a small change has disproportionate effect. It applies to technical systems, organisations, markets, and processes alike, and the capability is the same in each.
What systems thinking is not
- It is not complexity of expression, and a description full of interacting factors that yields no usable claim is the failure mode rather than the capability. It is not diagram production: a map with every entity and no view about which connection matters is a picture of the problem. It is not holism as a disposition, meaning a preference for talking about the big picture, which is frequently a way of avoiding the specific. It is not analysis, which decomposes and examines parts, where this capability is concerned with what the parts do to each other. And it is not pessimism, though the habit of tracing second-order effects can present that way.