The Starting Point Counts
Of late, I have been juggling a few ideas about: mostly informed by a book I am reading — Creativity, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — a study of mental models meticulously curated by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, and about Fractals in context of Complexity Theory. I am further helped by the structure of another writing exercise I have taken up to explain what I know of Facilitation in a way which is digestible and helpful to reference.
I have a fault of taking many things for granted, especially names du jour such as Design Thinking and Systems Thinking. I fault myself for not noticing this sooner, but my curiosity is now peaked to take the next 15 minutes to order what has been swirling about in my mind.
It starts with Feedback Loops, otherwise known as Homeostasis. This is an observable phenomena where systems attempt to restore order to itself. A feedback loop is created when a reaction has an effect on itself. The usual analogy for feedback loops is usually the body regulating its own temperature. Or take the universal problem of the office thermostat to show the effects of a negative feedback loop: the heater switches off when the room reaches the (non-consensual) temperature, the room cools down, and then triggers the heater to start again until it reaches equilibrium.
I digress, as usual. My humble epiphany was how similar and yet different the practice of Systems Thinking and Design Thinking are. Apart from their fashionable use amongst innovation groups — teams of people in charge of applying new ways of working and making — they share a process that opens up a context wider than traditional models [examples]. There is nothing new under the sun, so they say, but some things need to be heard again. The cycles of performance squeeze out valuable thinking that goes into solving a problem, which both these models create space to do.
The difference between them intrigues me the most. If we posit that everything in life is by definition part of a whole system, why is it that we do not employ the collective analysis of Systems Thinking in business and product? It is because businesses and their teams are bound by time and performance: even though if there are several problems in the world worth solving, they must choose what is 1) something they are good at, 2) something that returns profit, and 3) returns it very fast. Also the lens to the problem is bound immediately into a process of localising a need to a money-making objective. We have some very serious problems to solve, and it requires the world as a system to approach the task of which nested entities are involved, but operate with a cultural DNA of a different world system. I wonder what the relationship between these two, perhaps more, models of thinking will serve to open our consciousness and practice to a universal-based approach to advancing our quest to keep our life system, not even flourishing, but from decay. Much more streams to mind about the human condition at individual level, contradictions of selfishness and altruism which inhabit one soul, and the physical laws of thermodynamics.
As a whimsical non sequitur, which pattern to my current thoughts I cannot yet articulate, but feel is viscerally related, is a haunting excerpt from an interview featured in the Wellcome Collection’s Ayuverdic Man exhibition:
Isn’t selling knowledge sinful?
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