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Systems thinking is, by far, my favorite mode of thinking. It's why I love programming, business, biology, mathematics, aerospace, etc... I'm convinced that bei
by bluejellybean 7y ago
Systems thinking is, by far, my favorite mode of thinking. It's why I love programming, business, biology, mathematics, aerospace, etc... I'm convinced that being able to think about abstract systems fluidly is a core skill that separates the good from great in many fields and this is probably more so true in software. I really wish there were better resources for building up this skill set. I was gifted with a decent intuition for it and gained a lot from engineering courses, but I just haven't found anything specific that I can point a junior engineer towards and say "This, this is the essence of systems thinking!". The closest thing I've found is a lecture series on the space shuttle design[0], and while the series is fantastic, it doesn't focus on the core idea of systems thinking. Does anyone have any useful resources or recommendations on the subject?
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/video-lectures/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...
- infinite8s 7y agoAlan Kay has spent a long time thinking about how to teach systems thinking to children (etoys, kadema,etc). Hopefully he sees this question (he sometimes posts as alan-1)
- alexpetralia 7y agoThere's a newsletter online called Resilience Roundup which, to a limited degree, covers these topics extremely well.
- l_t 7y agoI have found "Thinking in Systems" [0] to be a good book for crystallizing "systems" concepts in abstract. For example, it includes discussions on feedback loops, bottlenecks, equilibrium, etc. IIRC, it has been used as a textbook for systems theory classes in some universities, but it's concise and written for a general audience. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603580557 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603580557