system thinking

Actually, I’ve never heard of the term system thinking before. But after Pro. Wang’s introduction, I realized that many examples which are familiar to me are indeed based on system thinking.

In my opinion, system thinking is an art of seeing the world in terms of wholes, and the practice of focusing on the relationship among the parts of a system. I suppose the system here occupies both time and space, as well as the combination of them.

I want to describe my own understanding of system thinking with something well-known— butterfly effect, which theorises that a change in something seemingly innocuous, such as a flap of a butterfly's wings, may cause unexpected larger changes in the future, such as a hurricane. In other words, small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. (From wikipedia)

To a certain degree, butterfly effect is correlated to system thinking. It is system thinking that encourage us to think about problems and solutions with an eye towards the long view. For instance, how might a particular solution you’re considering play out over the long term. And what united consequences might it have.

Sometimes if we use traditional analysis, which focus on separating the individual pieces of what is being studied, instead of system thinking, the results may be far away from what we expected and have a great deal of feedback from other resources, internal or external .

At one time, Australians lived on sheep. Wolves were sheep’s biggest threaten on the grassland. Australians killed most of the wolves in order to protect their sheep. As a result, the number of sheep became so large that the grassland was heavily damaged and the ecosystem was out of balance. Australians have to bring in wolves from other countries to maintain the ecosystem’s equilibrium.
Australians only focused on immediate interest and ignored long-term effects. Their decision without system thinking led to the tragedy.

To form the habit of system thinking, we must plan everything related to our goal in advance. First of all, acquaint yourself with all of your system’s parts: people, equipment and processes. Secondly, find loops of causal relationships and search for feedbacks in both policies and mental models. Thirdly, overcome obvious solutions with unwanted side effects using various supporting tools and methods. And above all, search for recurrent patterns of behaviour over time and think in continuous terms.

As a new engineering student, I didn’t have any programming experience. When doing the assignment of CSC1110(introduction to computer programming using C), I came across assorted difficulties. First time when I finish my program and debug it, the compiler told me there were as many as 22 errors in my program, which greatly perturbed me. I went through every error line the compiler had pointed out but couldn’t make any sense of it. Finally I remembered the tutor’s words and examined the program as a whole. Eventually I found one } missing, which was the real error.

Now I have learned that a program is an integral consists of various functions and there exist some certain relationships between them. When programming, we must take the program as a whole and discover further relationship using system thinking. Thanks to system thinking, I realize that sometimes the number of errors in the list may be far greater than the real number of errors in your code and the location of errors in the list may not be the exact location of error.

Engineering learning helps me with my time management as well. As engineering is a logic subject, I become more organized while learning it. Now I can allocate my time more reasonable and do different things in appropriate times, thus raising my learning efficiency and enhancing my system intelligence.