Talk:Systems thinking

Discussion for older versions
Very negative description of System's thinking, very one sided, and not really very clear what "systems thinking is". As a non-philosopher, I had to read this article twice, then go to wiki to understand "systems thinking". The wiki article is much more clear, but more importantly, shows systems thinking is an important way to see the world. I'd like to make some changes, but I'd like to recruit someone who actually knows what this is, to look them over? Godot  I smell roasted chestnuts. droollllllll. 14:56, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yeah, there is something very wrong here. Scarlet A.pnggnostic 15:03, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It was started by LX, so Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 16:04, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps. I think it's because it's focused entirely on politics I'm not sure it gets the message across well. Sure, some of those applications may well be invalid but that doesn't therefore imply "systems thinking" is wrong. Scarlet A.pnggnostic 16:09, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I assume that business, religion, and engineering qualify as "politics" for the purposes of that statement? 18:51, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, the section on engineering is a joke. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 19:06, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

A decade later, the text is now more fully changed, so that the above no longer applies. It's a shame it took a decade to fix the really big problem with this article, though, which is how it conflated holism with systems thinking (treating them as synonyms), thus being wildly inaccurate. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 12:52, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

The quote dismisses real societal issues
The <abbr title="If a barber has cut his customer's throat because the girl has changed her partner for a dance or donkey ride on Hampstead Heath, there are always people to protest against the mere institutions that led up to it. This would not have happened if barbers were abolished, or if cutlery were abolished, or if the objection felt by girls to imperfectly grown beards were abolished, or if the girls were abolished, or if heaths and open spaces were abolished, or if dancing were abolished, or if donkeys were abolished.">quote is a bad example of Systems Thinking, not only does it describe actually Reductionist solutions G.K. Chesterton consider wrong (the correct one implicitly being the barber's personal moral failure), it dismisses the fact that this situation does come from a systemic issue (toxic masculinity).

We can do better than this.

PS: i am completely unrelated to BON 1.136.105.106--Alficiro (talk) 03:36, 23 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I removed that quote from the newly reworked version. It fit the pattern of failing to describe what systems thinking actually is (the artile used to conflate it with lousy holistic thinking). --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 12:55, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

For possible expansion or reworking...
Currently, I find the article quite disappointing, because it doesn't describe anything good under the heading of "Systems thinking", but mainly treats it as a vague counterpoint to reductionism and a buzzword used by BS artists (mostly ignoring real engineering-related resources on the topic).

In engineering, systems thinking can for example be found in the form of taking into account how parts of a whole interact so as to build something which lasts even if parts of the whole are damaged or destroyed, perhaps by compensating or even (easy enough in the world of software) re-spawning or recovering the lost parts of the whole. More generally, you'll find it in the construction of systems of regulation using feedback loops to keep activity or state within acceptable bounds.

In psychology of leadership, the lack of any systems thinking can amount to reducing each person to an assigned job-label, and viewing a labeled leader as the source of threats and rewards. By contrast, systems thinking approaches look for some things to measure and then look at the more complex parts individuals seem to play in relation to those measures.

There's a nice graph by Gerald M. Weinberg (writer on the topic) I can't find again right now (but did see online a few years ago), relating the usefulness of systems thinking to the measure of complexity (quantity) and organization (dependence vs. independence of parts). If you can simplify away all but a few significant unique things to fully model something (e.g. classical mechanics and bodies of the solar system), you don't need a general systems approach. If instead you have many things which are all alike, like molecules of a gas, then you can treat them as a statistical aggregate. But if you are in the awkward middle-ground of having too many things which cannot be simplified away, and which are too unique to usefully be reduced to one statistical entity, then the "general systems thinking" approach gathers similar ideas about structure and relationship from various fields which may be the best bet. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 16:21, 15 May 2021 (UTC)