Systems thinking is an entirely different way of managing your organization. A typical organization uses many different methods to market a product, buy merchandise, manage customer relationships and so much more. By learning how to manage these procedures, you’ll be able to run your company more effectively.
While business managers and entrepreneurs use this style of thinking, it is also quietly growing in popularity in fields like cybernetics, biology and others. Researchers take a systemic perspective when figuring out how techniques work and how they can be more proactive within them. If you can anticipate what will happen, you can shape the outcome you want and control the system.
Systems thinking encourages us to explore inter-relationships, perspectives and boundaries. It is especially trenchant when applied to address complex or wicked problem situations. That’s because complex problems aren’t remedied be any one actor, any more than a complex system can be fully understood from only one perspective.
Systems thinking is an essential skill for systems engineers because it is shared with many disciplines and provides a key intellectual underpinning for systems engineering.
Adopting a systems approach takes persistence and curiosity. Many people have thought systemically all their lives. But for most, the jump to systems thinking requires time, practice, curiosity and intentionality.
And then, once you get the hang of it, you might feel like the sole systems thinker in a linear thinking organization – a lonely place.
Still, for systems engineering, the benefits are considerable for developing a systems thinking shift of mind, such as:
- Aligns teams, disciplines, specialisms and interest groups
- Minimizes the impact of unintended consequences
- Maximizes outcomes
- Manages risk, uncertainty and opportunity
- Helps to understand complex problems
Contrasted with positivist and reductionist thinking, systems thinking sets out to view systems in a holistic manner. Consistent with systems philosophy, systems thinking concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the elements that comprise the whole of the system.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Systems Thinking Training, a 2-day course that covers the theory, rational, tools, and techniques associated with systems thinking.
Systems thinking training course concentrates on determining the interconnections between the various components of a system and manufacturing them into a coherent perspective of the whole.
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.