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How to Be a Systems Thinker

283 points by raleighm 9y ago

wyc 9y ago
A great book for this is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. She has many illustrative examples that really help get the points across. Coming from an electrical engineering background, I found her discussion around the interactions between positive and negative loops to be very interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Hmm, someone claims that she invented Malthusianism. She must have a time travel system.... "Limits to Growth―the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet"
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  Agreed. This is a nice primer.
- neurocline 9y ago
  I tried reading this book several years ago and bounced right off. Given the multiple recommendations, I'll give it a second try.
  - hiq 9y ago
    You can always start with the summary given at the end of the book (IIRC), and maybe that'll be enough to trigger your interest and motivates your going through at least some of the chapters.
  - mvkel 9y ago
    A possible alternative might be The Fifth Discipline. I found it a bit easier to process.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Systems Thinking has been a huge buzzword in the Coursera course catalog in recent years (that's where I first heard the term called out as a special thing outside of just "how we learn science"): https://www.google.com/search?q=coursera+systems+thinking https://www.google.com/search?q=coursera+systems+thinking gets many hits.
somtum2 9y ago
What are good resources to help start thinking in systems when designing software?
- fallous 9y ago
  It may seem glib, but the best resource to spur one to think systemically is a three year-old child. Their favorite word seems to be "why?" and they will keep asking it until you either reach an abstraction they accept, you get tired and concede you don't know by saying "because I said so," or they get tired and find something else. The third option is rare in my experience.
goofingaround 9y ago
>... we’re all seeing is that a lot of work that has been done to enable international cooperation ... pulled apart. We’re seeing the progress we thought had been made in this country in race relations being reversed. We’re seeing the partial breakup ... of a united Europe... > One of the problems when you bring technology into a new area is that it forces you to oversimplify. It is fortunate that we have thinkers such as this to simplify the world for us. Should we pine for the united Europe of Rome? Of the Reich? Was it evil to tear down those cooperative societies?
- analog31 9y ago
  REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? XERXES: Brought peace. REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up! -- Life of Brian
- sievebrain 9y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that. Then she went on to talk about how she was asked to write about systems thinking even though she knows nothing about it, and wrote a preface based on a few minutes googling. I admit I stopped reading at that point. Bog standard Marxist thought in academic circles? Starting an article supposed to be about systems thinking with a noisy announcement of tribal loyalty? Yawn.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Well, we give the Charlemagne Prize, despite his unification efforts not being exactly democratic. That said, I think the author could argue that by mentioning "progress in race relations" they are disqualifying the Third Reich.
bshepard 9y ago
I found this paragraph especially thought-provoking: "Americans are inclined to talk about the "war against drugs," or the "war against poverty," or the "war against cancer," without questioning whether "war" is an appropriate metaphor. It’s a way of talking about complexity, but if it doesn’t fit, it will cause you to make errors in how you deal with your problems. The war on poverty failed partly because poverty is not something you can defeat, and that makes warfare an inappropriate metaphor. The same is true with the war on drugs, which has gotten us into some ugly situations. "
- fallous 9y ago
  Actually the term "war" in the contexts of drugs and poverty is appropriate since they both depend upon force as the means to achieve their goals as they depend upon government action.
  - janimo 9y ago
    It is only appropriate if you cannot conceive government actions that have nothing to do with force :)
    - fallous 9y ago
      And what actions would those be that do not, eventually, rely upon force?
      - forkandwait 9y ago
        Providing subsidized college education, for example?
        fallous 9y ago
        And that money comes from where?
        9y ago
Barrin92 9y ago
>. It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom—I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional—are going to be lacking. This I think is a very salient point. What is missing in the field at the moment to truly advance is a theory of 'agency' or how intelligent systems can be trained to venture out into the world and develop their own models, set their own incentives and continuously interact with their environment and develop their own 'games' from unstructured data rather than optimising towards some fixed goal.
fallous 9y ago
I jarred a bit at her use of the word "metaphor" to describe understanding, and upon reflect I think I understand why I reacted that way. Metaphors lack the requisite understanding of an analogy in that they apply at best partially to artifacts of the intended reference. An analogy has to match, or at least rhyme, with the logic of a system in order to apply. There is a reason that analog computing mattered, and why no one seriously focuses on metaphoric computing (except, you know, as a metaphor for something that isn't computing). I suspect that metaphors are the tools of cargo cults while analogies are the tools used by those that actually understand a system in order to convey it to those that do not.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Metaphor isn't necessarily vague. You can have extended metaphors, which can have surprising and informing depth. It can even be an isomorphism. e.g. the desktop metaphor
  - fallous 9y ago
    The "desktop metaphor" is a conceit, in the literary sense, that provides a general structure to a presentation but it isn't truly useful as a means of conveying the logic or expectations of a system in the way that an analogy provides.
    - hyperpallium 9y ago
      An aspect that does is the position of a mouse on a desktop with the position of a cursor on the screen.
      - fallous 9y ago
        Except that the "desktop metaphor" stops being a "desktop" with the introduction of a cursor and mouse. Actual desktops are manipulated directly by users... and desktops don't allow you to move your hand all the way to the right and magically move to a new clean desk (in the case of virtual windows). There's nothing about a desktop that infers the behaviors described which is why it's crappy for conveying the actual behaviors of current UI... hence the limited nature of metaphor.
hyperpallium 9y ago
Article doesn't define it, but "systems thinking" is an actual thing: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Oh thank you thank you. At first I thought was justing thinking in the systems engineering area (which it is partly). And then I grew more mystified as the article didn't touch on that. So I suspected that it was just waffle which that wikipedia article addresses: > [criticised as] ... said to be nothing more than an admonishment to attend to things in a holistic way. Which I think is actually right. Too high level to be actionable or definable.
sharno 9y ago
Seems to me like category theory for mathematics, but a more generalized one that could be applied to things in life. Sounds cool
kawera 9y ago
What a great last paragraph: "The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in."
- jpswade 9y ago
  Interesting. The people who know how to make marketable gadgets must understand systems theory in order to sell it. It's interesting because it's about culture and culture is a system of ideas, rituals and behaviours. We are living in a cybernetic culture right now, so what's next? That's what we need to understand. What do we want?
- carapace 9y ago
  Yes! I have been bewildered as to why Cybernetics has been so woefully neglected. "Introduction to Cybernetics" is available as a free PDF. (Linked from this page: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html ) Cybernetics is formally beyond logic. It deals with circular loops in causality in the most general yet concrete sense. One way I try to describe it (to an audience like HN readers) is that Information Theory is about making the real world behave like symbols, while Cybernetics is about making symbols behave like the real world.
  - pm90 9y ago
    This sounds very interesting. I don't think I ever encountered Cybernetics in college nor in all these years as a professional software engineer. Any more resources apart from the linked pdf that you would recommend, perhaps tailored to someone with a CS background? (I'm reading through the pdf, just wanted to see if there were other treatments on this topic)
    - carapace 9y ago
      "Introduction to Cybernetics" is technical and very much in the spirit of CS. A lot of what gets called "cybernetics" tends to be kind of "fluffy" and I personally avoid that stuff. I'd recommend Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Co... And "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Wiener-teleology.pdf http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Wiener-teleology.pdf
csnewb 9y ago
I've been seeing a lot of threads/articles about systems thinking come up on HN lately. As a developer, why is it important to learn "systems thinking"? How will it make me a better developer?
- smadge 9y ago
  > How will it make me a better developer? Well, focusing a component of the system (software development) while neglecting to consider how that component interacts with the whole system (society and ecology), is exactly the sort of myopic thinking that systems thinking proclaims to remedy.
- thex10 9y ago
  I find systems thinking an interesting subject but honestly I think it is more useful for people higher up (PMs, etc) and/or people whose primary work is more along the lines of strategizing and evaluation more than implementation
arca_vorago 9y ago
"How do you deal with ignorance? I don’t mean how do you shut ignorance out. Rather, how do you deal with an awareness of what you don’t know, and you don’t know how to know, in dealing with a particular problem?" I don't really like the rambling tone of the article which never really addresses it's central premise-questions. Look, systems thinking is about thinking. Thinking is about how you were trained to think. To become a systems thinker, learn how to think better, how to think differently, how to think critically, and how to think logically. Now self-examine, correct problems, and repeat loop. For example, the thing many elite schools teach that most others don't is the trivium and quadrivium approach to thinking. Another trick is less tangible. Find brilliant people and learn from them. Learn what they do wrong, not just what they do right. Finally, as a sysadmin, if you learn to think in a flowchart about just about any problem you will be fine... but the trick to that is to be specific about what the problem is.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
  agree there are better authors to learn how to think: D. Kahneman, A. Tversky, D. Hofstaedter, D. Dennet, K Popper, B. Russell, K. Goedel, N. Taelb, ... if you are in this same echo-chamber as me I'd love to hear who I forgot My experience here is if you start with one of the above names (and are a fan of logic), you most likely end up reading all of them. (But maybe it's just me idk?)
  - bcbrown 9y ago
    Wittgenstein, Gerry Weinberg, Korzybsky, and The Systems Bible by John Gant. Gregory Bateson.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Meadows and Forester.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      That should be "Forrester".
- 9y ago
codecurve 9y ago
There are actually a lot of great materials available on Systems Thinking, here are a few of our favourites: Articles: - Introduction to Systems Thinking (https://thesystemsthinker.com/introduction-to-systems-thinking/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/introduction-to-systems-thinki...) - Tools of a Systems Thinker (https://medium.com/disruptive-design/tools-for-systems-thinkers-the-6-fundamental-concepts-of-systems-thinking-379cdac3dc6a https://medium.com/disruptive-design/tools-for-systems-think...) - The Mythical Leverage Point (https://blog.kumu.io/the-mythical-leverage-point-d582ce4b8b49 https://blog.kumu.io/the-mythical-leverage-point-d582ce4b8b4...) Videos: - Peter Senge Introduction to Systems Thinking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdzKBWDraM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdzKBWDraM) - I Used To Be A Systems Thinker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ymt_TbNNwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ymt_TbNNwE) - The (Failed) Promised of Systems Thinking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=614&v=aelqgvFXGiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=614&v=aelqgvFXGi...) - Systems Practice Mindsets (https://vimeo.com/212281432 https://vimeo.com/212281432) Courses: - +Acumen Systems Practice Course (https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/systems-practice https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/systems-practice) Books: - Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557/ https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...) - Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Fieldbook-Strategies-Organization/dp/0385472560 https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Fieldbook-Strategies...) - Systems Thinking for Social Change (https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Thinking-Social-Change-Consequences/dp/160358580X https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Thinking-Social-Change-Conseq...) Articles on Leading Systems Change: - Dawn of Systems Leadership (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadershi...) - Acting and Thinking Systemically (https://thesystemsthinker.com/acting-and-thinking-systemically/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/acting-and-thinking-systemical...) - Transforming the Systems Movement (https://thesystemsthinker.com/transforming-the-systems-movement/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/transforming-the-systems-movem...) Relevant Tools and Websites: - Kumu (https://kumu.io https://kumu.io) - Web-based tool for building interactive system maps. - The Systems Thinker (https://thesystemsthinker.com/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/) - Complete library of all "The Systems Thinker" publications over the past 30 years - Loopy (http://ncase.me/loopy/ http://ncase.me/loopy/) - An playground for building interactive systems maps. (Disclosure: I'm a Developer at Kumu)
cJ0th 9y ago
I want to like the idea but articles like this one are just intellectual drivel to me. People are systems thinker by nature I believe. If there are negative side effects to their actions then it's rather because they don't mind. A company, for instance, cares about environmental side effects only as much as it needs to in order to keep going. But that does not mean they don't see, say, their supply chain as a system. I'd say thinking in systems is more of an art than a rational thing. You have to do it as often as possible to get better at it but there isn't much you really need to know. Sit down, think really hard for 2 minutes, rest a bit and repeat the process as often as necessary.
- mhluongo 9y ago
  "Oh, you're a theoretical physicist? I find theoretical physics is just thinking. Think hard, and repeat!" There's more to both the study of systems and the mindset than "think". Knowledge of a subject is knowledge of differences and distinctions- reductionism doesn't mean you know something, often quite the opposite. It took many of us a long time to better think about complex systems, especially those systems we grew up as a part of. There are a number of useful mental patterns that have helped me in my limited journey (eg OODA, feedback mechanisms from cybernetics) and it's not clear to me I'd have recognized the concepts were valuable enough to name on my own.
solidist 9y ago
Great post, but lofty. Here is an example of a relatable situtational system thinking in the very small: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-organize-your-thoughts-on-the-whiteboard-and-crush-your-technical-interview-b668de4e6941 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-organize-your-thought... I havent read much on the theories, but part of my write was also inspired by two books and hence why I am responding to help others. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt and The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge helped me with this type of thinking. A few things key concepts. Organization of related systems and their interaction patterns. But a key, that you are also apart of the system as you interact. For instance, the causal link of bringing sweet smelling dry erase markers. You could shift the whole system of interview rating based on memory of smell on that sweet expo choco mint as you erase your complex mistakes away. Or they could think that you're just crazy.
cuttor 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S_ibxarEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S_ibxarEg

283 points by raleighm 9y ago

wyc 9y ago

A great book for this is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. She has many illustrative examples that really help get the points across. Coming from an electrical engineering background, I found her discussion around the interactions between positive and negative loops to be very interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...

fjsolwmv 9y ago
Hmm, someone claims that she invented Malthusianism. She must have a time travel system.... "Limits to Growth―the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet"
germinalphrase 9y ago
Agreed. This is a nice primer.
neurocline 9y ago
I tried reading this book several years ago and bounced right off. Given the multiple recommendations, I'll give it a second try.
- hiq 9y ago
  You can always start with the summary given at the end of the book (IIRC), and maybe that'll be enough to trigger your interest and motivates your going through at least some of the chapters.
- mvkel 9y ago
  A possible alternative might be The Fifth Discipline. I found it a bit easier to process.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

Systems Thinking has been a huge buzzword in the Coursera course catalog in recent years (that's where I first heard the term called out as a special thing outside of just "how we learn science"): https://www.google.com/search?q=coursera+systems+thinking https://www.google.com/search?q=coursera+systems+thinking gets many hits.

somtum2 9y ago

What are good resources to help start thinking in systems when designing software?

fallous 9y ago
It may seem glib, but the best resource to spur one to think systemically is a three year-old child. Their favorite word seems to be "why?" and they will keep asking it until you either reach an abstraction they accept, you get tired and concede you don't know by saying "because I said so," or they get tired and find something else. The third option is rare in my experience.

goofingaround 9y ago

>... we’re all seeing is that a lot of work that has been done to enable international cooperation ... pulled apart. We’re seeing the progress we thought had been made in this country in race relations being reversed. We’re seeing the partial breakup ... of a united Europe... > One of the problems when you bring technology into a new area is that it forces you to oversimplify. It is fortunate that we have thinkers such as this to simplify the world for us. Should we pine for the united Europe of Rome? Of the Reich? Was it evil to tear down those cooperative societies?

analog31 9y ago
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? XERXES: Brought peace. REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up! -- Life of Brian
sievebrain 9y ago
Yeah, I noticed that. Then she went on to talk about how she was asked to write about systems thinking even though she knows nothing about it, and wrote a preface based on a few minutes googling. I admit I stopped reading at that point. Bog standard Marxist thought in academic circles? Starting an article supposed to be about systems thinking with a noisy announcement of tribal loyalty? Yawn.
icebraining 9y ago
Well, we give the Charlemagne Prize, despite his unification efforts not being exactly democratic. That said, I think the author could argue that by mentioning "progress in race relations" they are disqualifying the Third Reich.

bshepard 9y ago

I found this paragraph especially thought-provoking: "Americans are inclined to talk about the "war against drugs," or the "war against poverty," or the "war against cancer," without questioning whether "war" is an appropriate metaphor. It’s a way of talking about complexity, but if it doesn’t fit, it will cause you to make errors in how you deal with your problems. The war on poverty failed partly because poverty is not something you can defeat, and that makes warfare an inappropriate metaphor. The same is true with the war on drugs, which has gotten us into some ugly situations. "

fallous 9y ago
Actually the term "war" in the contexts of drugs and poverty is appropriate since they both depend upon force as the means to achieve their goals as they depend upon government action.
- janimo 9y ago
  It is only appropriate if you cannot conceive government actions that have nothing to do with force :)
  - fallous 9y ago
    And what actions would those be that do not, eventually, rely upon force?
    - forkandwait 9y ago
      Providing subsidized college education, for example?
      - fallous 9y ago
        And that money comes from where?
        9y ago

Barrin92 9y ago

>. It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom—I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional—are going to be lacking. This I think is a very salient point. What is missing in the field at the moment to truly advance is a theory of 'agency' or how intelligent systems can be trained to venture out into the world and develop their own models, set their own incentives and continuously interact with their environment and develop their own 'games' from unstructured data rather than optimising towards some fixed goal.

fallous 9y ago

I jarred a bit at her use of the word "metaphor" to describe understanding, and upon reflect I think I understand why I reacted that way. Metaphors lack the requisite understanding of an analogy in that they apply at best partially to artifacts of the intended reference. An analogy has to match, or at least rhyme, with the logic of a system in order to apply. There is a reason that analog computing mattered, and why no one seriously focuses on metaphoric computing (except, you know, as a metaphor for something that isn't computing). I suspect that metaphors are the tools of cargo cults while analogies are the tools used by those that actually understand a system in order to convey it to those that do not.

hyperpallium 9y ago
Metaphor isn't necessarily vague. You can have extended metaphors, which can have surprising and informing depth. It can even be an isomorphism. e.g. the desktop metaphor
- fallous 9y ago
  The "desktop metaphor" is a conceit, in the literary sense, that provides a general structure to a presentation but it isn't truly useful as a means of conveying the logic or expectations of a system in the way that an analogy provides.
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    An aspect that does is the position of a mouse on a desktop with the position of a cursor on the screen.
    - fallous 9y ago
      Except that the "desktop metaphor" stops being a "desktop" with the introduction of a cursor and mouse. Actual desktops are manipulated directly by users... and desktops don't allow you to move your hand all the way to the right and magically move to a new clean desk (in the case of virtual windows). There's nothing about a desktop that infers the behaviors described which is why it's crappy for conveying the actual behaviors of current UI... hence the limited nature of metaphor.

hyperpallium 9y ago

Article doesn't define it, but "systems thinking" is an actual thing: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory

emmelaich 9y ago
Oh thank you thank you. At first I thought was justing thinking in the systems engineering area (which it is partly). And then I grew more mystified as the article didn't touch on that. So I suspected that it was just waffle which that wikipedia article addresses: > [criticised as] ... said to be nothing more than an admonishment to attend to things in a holistic way. Which I think is actually right. Too high level to be actionable or definable.

sharno 9y ago

Seems to me like category theory for mathematics, but a more generalized one that could be applied to things in life. Sounds cool

kawera 9y ago

What a great last paragraph: "The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in."

jpswade 9y ago
Interesting. The people who know how to make marketable gadgets must understand systems theory in order to sell it. It's interesting because it's about culture and culture is a system of ideas, rituals and behaviours. We are living in a cybernetic culture right now, so what's next? That's what we need to understand. What do we want?
carapace 9y ago
Yes! I have been bewildered as to why Cybernetics has been so woefully neglected. "Introduction to Cybernetics" is available as a free PDF. (Linked from this page: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html ) Cybernetics is formally beyond logic. It deals with circular loops in causality in the most general yet concrete sense. One way I try to describe it (to an audience like HN readers) is that Information Theory is about making the real world behave like symbols, while Cybernetics is about making symbols behave like the real world.
- pm90 9y ago
  This sounds very interesting. I don't think I ever encountered Cybernetics in college nor in all these years as a professional software engineer. Any more resources apart from the linked pdf that you would recommend, perhaps tailored to someone with a CS background? (I'm reading through the pdf, just wanted to see if there were other treatments on this topic)
  - carapace 9y ago
    "Introduction to Cybernetics" is technical and very much in the spirit of CS. A lot of what gets called "cybernetics" tends to be kind of "fluffy" and I personally avoid that stuff. I'd recommend Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Co... And "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Wiener-teleology.pdf http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Wiener-teleology.pdf

csnewb 9y ago

I've been seeing a lot of threads/articles about systems thinking come up on HN lately. As a developer, why is it important to learn "systems thinking"? How will it make me a better developer?

smadge 9y ago
> How will it make me a better developer? Well, focusing a component of the system (software development) while neglecting to consider how that component interacts with the whole system (society and ecology), is exactly the sort of myopic thinking that systems thinking proclaims to remedy.
thex10 9y ago
I find systems thinking an interesting subject but honestly I think it is more useful for people higher up (PMs, etc) and/or people whose primary work is more along the lines of strategizing and evaluation more than implementation

arca_vorago 9y ago

"How do you deal with ignorance? I don’t mean how do you shut ignorance out. Rather, how do you deal with an awareness of what you don’t know, and you don’t know how to know, in dealing with a particular problem?" I don't really like the rambling tone of the article which never really addresses it's central premise-questions. Look, systems thinking is about thinking. Thinking is about how you were trained to think. To become a systems thinker, learn how to think better, how to think differently, how to think critically, and how to think logically. Now self-examine, correct problems, and repeat loop. For example, the thing many elite schools teach that most others don't is the trivium and quadrivium approach to thinking. Another trick is less tangible. Find brilliant people and learn from them. Learn what they do wrong, not just what they do right. Finally, as a sysadmin, if you learn to think in a flowchart about just about any problem you will be fine... but the trick to that is to be specific about what the problem is.

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
agree there are better authors to learn how to think: D. Kahneman, A. Tversky, D. Hofstaedter, D. Dennet, K Popper, B. Russell, K. Goedel, N. Taelb, ... if you are in this same echo-chamber as me I'd love to hear who I forgot My experience here is if you start with one of the above names (and are a fan of logic), you most likely end up reading all of them. (But maybe it's just me idk?)
- bcbrown 9y ago
  Wittgenstein, Gerry Weinberg, Korzybsky, and The Systems Bible by John Gant. Gregory Bateson.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Meadows and Forester.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    That should be "Forrester".
9y ago

codecurve 9y ago

There are actually a lot of great materials available on Systems Thinking, here are a few of our favourites: Articles: - Introduction to Systems Thinking (https://thesystemsthinker.com/introduction-to-systems-thinking/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/introduction-to-systems-thinki...) - Tools of a Systems Thinker (https://medium.com/disruptive-design/tools-for-systems-thinkers-the-6-fundamental-concepts-of-systems-thinking-379cdac3dc6a https://medium.com/disruptive-design/tools-for-systems-think...) - The Mythical Leverage Point (https://blog.kumu.io/the-mythical-leverage-point-d582ce4b8b49 https://blog.kumu.io/the-mythical-leverage-point-d582ce4b8b4...) Videos: - Peter Senge Introduction to Systems Thinking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdzKBWDraM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXdzKBWDraM) - I Used To Be A Systems Thinker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ymt_TbNNwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ymt_TbNNwE) - The (Failed) Promised of Systems Thinking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=614&v=aelqgvFXGiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=614&v=aelqgvFXGi...) - Systems Practice Mindsets (https://vimeo.com/212281432 https://vimeo.com/212281432) Courses: - +Acumen Systems Practice Course (https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/systems-practice https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/systems-practice) Books: - Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557/ https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...) - Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Fieldbook-Strategies-Organization/dp/0385472560 https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Fieldbook-Strategies...) - Systems Thinking for Social Change (https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Thinking-Social-Change-Consequences/dp/160358580X https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Thinking-Social-Change-Conseq...) Articles on Leading Systems Change: - Dawn of Systems Leadership (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadershi...) - Acting and Thinking Systemically (https://thesystemsthinker.com/acting-and-thinking-systemically/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/acting-and-thinking-systemical...) - Transforming the Systems Movement (https://thesystemsthinker.com/transforming-the-systems-movement/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/transforming-the-systems-movem...) Relevant Tools and Websites: - Kumu (https://kumu.io https://kumu.io) - Web-based tool for building interactive system maps. - The Systems Thinker (https://thesystemsthinker.com/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/) - Complete library of all "The Systems Thinker" publications over the past 30 years - Loopy (http://ncase.me/loopy/ http://ncase.me/loopy/) - An playground for building interactive systems maps. (Disclosure: I'm a Developer at Kumu)

cJ0th 9y ago

I want to like the idea but articles like this one are just intellectual drivel to me. People are systems thinker by nature I believe. If there are negative side effects to their actions then it's rather because they don't mind. A company, for instance, cares about environmental side effects only as much as it needs to in order to keep going. But that does not mean they don't see, say, their supply chain as a system. I'd say thinking in systems is more of an art than a rational thing. You have to do it as often as possible to get better at it but there isn't much you really need to know. Sit down, think really hard for 2 minutes, rest a bit and repeat the process as often as necessary.

mhluongo 9y ago
"Oh, you're a theoretical physicist? I find theoretical physics is just thinking. Think hard, and repeat!" There's more to both the study of systems and the mindset than "think". Knowledge of a subject is knowledge of differences and distinctions- reductionism doesn't mean you know something, often quite the opposite. It took many of us a long time to better think about complex systems, especially those systems we grew up as a part of. There are a number of useful mental patterns that have helped me in my limited journey (eg OODA, feedback mechanisms from cybernetics) and it's not clear to me I'd have recognized the concepts were valuable enough to name on my own.

solidist 9y ago

Great post, but lofty. Here is an example of a relatable situtational system thinking in the very small: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-organize-your-thoughts-on-the-whiteboard-and-crush-your-technical-interview-b668de4e6941 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-organize-your-thought... I havent read much on the theories, but part of my write was also inspired by two books and hence why I am responding to help others. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt and The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge helped me with this type of thinking. A few things key concepts. Organization of related systems and their interaction patterns. But a key, that you are also apart of the system as you interact. For instance, the causal link of bringing sweet smelling dry erase markers. You could shift the whole system of interview rating based on memory of smell on that sweet expo choco mint as you erase your complex mistakes away. Or they could think that you're just crazy.

cuttor 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S_ibxarEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8S_ibxarEg