Systems Thinking: The Art of Understanding the Dynamics of Systems

Systems Thinking was introduced by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline (Doubleday, New York, 1990). It is a discipline for seeing wholes, recognizing patterns and interrelationships, and learning how to structure those interrelationships in more effective, efficient ways. Systems Thinking is a discipline in that it proposes: - to train us to observe reality as composed of dynamic systems; - to provide us powerful models of description and simulation; - to improve our ability to gain knowledge, that is to learn; - to develop our intelligence. Systems Thinking, in that it is a discipline, must be learned gradually, with practice, and continually perfected. In his book, Peter Senge presents Systems Thinking in an intuitive way, but he does not provide the logical principles behind it. I believe that the logical structure of this discipline can be summarized in five fundamental rules the systems thinker must follow at all times: 1. if we wish to understand the world we must be able to see the “trees through the forest”; we must develop the capacity to “zoom” in and out from whole to parts, from systems to components; 2. we must not limit our observation to what appears constant but “look for that which varies”. Variables – and the “variations” that these undergo over time – are what interests the systems thinker; 3. if we want to understand reality we must connect the variables which are of interest to us in a chain of causal relations among the connected variables; 4. we must “link the variables” in order to specify the loops between all those variations, thereby transforming the linear variations into system interactions among the variables; 5. when we observe the world we must always specify the boundaries of the system we are examining.