People are not neutral observers of their environments; people + their environments create interactions, and the same environment can be sampled by different people with extremely different OR extremely shared perceptual filters because of our shared (or conflicting) social identities.
This is why it is neither about individuals, nor about "systems without individuals"; it is about multisystems models that understand emergent interactions (sorry! it's way harder)
@grimalkina Great question! This definition is going to lack rigor, but thinking about software, organizations, and humans holistically, in terms of their interactions with each other. I also like Donella Meadows' concept of stocks and flows. The behaviors of individual components can influence the overall system behavior in ways that are emergent and difficult to predict, but perhaps understandable in retrospect.
Maybe a shortcut is "systems thinking is whatever @RuthMalan says it is" 😅
Fair! "Whatever @RuthMalan says it is" is basically my definition too. I sometimes feel a tiny bit prickly when people say "oh that's systems thinking" because I'm like....this is social science and psychology and always has been, you engineers just never valued it or read any of it 😅 (not speaking directly to you two as individuals ofc)
@jawnsy @RuthMalan if I haven't recommended it before, I bet you would both enjoy this bold paper from a social science POV (written to challenge psychology and other behavioral science fields, but I think quite attuned with what you think about)
@grimalkina @jawnsy that’s wonderful! Thanks!
I read some reviews of Diana Montalion’s book (Learning Systems Thinking) on goodreads… that struck me as “what gives this woman the right to use the systems thinking term, and take it in a direction i don’t expect/think it should go” … It’s more like a ..space.. and trying to force-fit it into *a* conceptualization is going to make it wonky…
Cat Hicks
Jonathan Yu
Ruth — of systems & design