Think In Systems: The Theory and Practice of Strategic Planning, Problem Solving, and Creating Lasting Results - Complexity Made Simple

Emergence is often the most difficult part to detect and understand, but once you understand it, you’ll be able to think about and predict outcomes from seemingly unrelated things.

Professor John Gerber at the University of Massachusetts identifies the following four structures: “1. Physical things — like vending machines, roads, traffic lights, or terrain. 2. Organizations — like corporations, governments, and schools. 3. Policies — like laws, regulations, and tax structures. 4. Ritual — habitual behaviors so ingrained that

The interconnections are usually a bit more difficult to determine, but they’re everything that brings the function of a system to life.

Systems thinking, in a sense, presents the fundamental principle of life — that everything in this world is interconnected; the actors affect each other directly or indirectly. As they say, a “butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.”

Emergence is the natural way things come together. When we talk about emergence, we are talking about the outcome that happens when different items interact with each other.

the actors have an effect on each other. These effects create certain feedback loops. To put it very simply, what goes around comes around.

Weinberg, the author of An Introduction of General Systems Thinking, asks three systems thinking questions that could be a good foundation for understanding any issue in any situation. These questions are: 1. Why do I see what I see? 2. Why do things stay the same? 3. Why do things change?[iv]

For example, everybody works hard to make the country’s economy flourish, yet there is a constant economic decline. Why? Systems mapping and systems dynamics modeling can answer this question and help us understand the system’s behavior over time. By understanding the behavior, we can find the causes as to why the economy is not performing well des

Donella Meadows, the mother of systems thinking, put interconnectedness in a more explicit explanation: “A system is a set of related components that work together in a particular environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the systems objective.”