Systems Thinking Doesn’t Solve It All
After writing 1500 words on it, I can safely say that Systems Thinking is yet another instance of consultants coming up with a set of convenient buzzwords and terms to explain something at £500 an hour that I could explain in 10 minutes for free.
I acknowledge that there is a need for people to sit back and look at things like processes and systems in order to better understand and improve them. What I don’t get is why it has to be wrapped up in endless diagrams, words that nobody else understands, and marketed as a silver bullet to solve all business woes.
Systems thinking is an approach to analysis that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when isolated from its environment or other parts of the system.
That’s it in a nutshell. Wikipedia rules. I have somehow managed to drag that sentence into a 1500 word report. It’s like UML all over again, but with fewer boxes.
Tags: business, consultants, pointless, report, systems thinking, UML
May 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Jakcson, good point. Systems thinking is a framework among many others that we can use to understand problems. The excitement behind it is that it has emerged as an alternative to reductionism. It also has the value of helping us understand the interconnection of components that are beyond the typical narrow scope we would consider in reductionist ways of thinking. I think the definition above is a good start but there are other important points revolving a shift from linear causality to non-linear causal chains. I would argue that the definition of what systems thinking is still evolving as we learn more.