Nick Jackson

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.

UML is horrible, cludgy, trying to be all things to all men, and all in all an over-complicated method of shoehorning an OO system into a non OO modelling framework.

It’s the kind of thing that actually gets in the way of real work, the type of thing generated by some consultant ’systems analyst’ to make the development team stop programming and document the system using a godawful syntax. Then the ‘consultant’ can look at the UML diagram and say “here’s your problem, this arrowhead should be filled in” when in fact the only reason it isn’t is because the developers couldn’t give two shits if the arrowhead is filled, hashed, open, closed or even pointing to the right place.

Seriously, I’ve spent longer trying to draw the UML than I would have taken to just write the damn program. Even in COBOL.