How To Use Systems Thinking To Understand And Communicate Complex Behaviours
Systems thinking provides a way to model complex behaviours which cannot be analysed with other approaches such as reductionism or linear thinking. Understanding how to describe a system is an essential skill for identifying and communicating why systems behave the way they do.
The system is more than its parts
Science encourages the study of subjects at ever increasing levels of detail. If we can reduce things to their basic components then we will have an explanation for everything. Large amounts of money is spent on grand atom smashers seeking to break the Universe down to its smallest constituent parts. Yet, does the study of these smaller particles bring us any closer to a unified theory of everything? So far the answer is no.
“In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such quality.” [Metaphysics Book VIII, 1045a.8–10, Aristotle; Translated W.D.Ross 1908]
Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384–322 BC), reasoned that the whole is more than its individual parts. He believed that, in…
