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Smart Reading. Summary: The Art of Systems Thinking. Essential Skills for Creativity and Problem Solving. Joseph O’Connor, Ian McDermott
Systems in a World of Systems
Thinking Beyond the Obvious
What is a system?
Complexity of Systems
Thinking in Terms of Feedback (Contour Thinking)
Building Mental Models
What are mental models?
How do mental models arise?
Cause and Effect
The Chaos Theory
Beyond Logic
Limiting Mental Models
Thinking in a New Way
Learning
What prevents us from learning?
Perspective
Depict Conclusions
Отрывок из книги
We are all systems living in a world of systems. The human body is an excellent example of a system consisting of a myriad of systems that work in harmony: immune, digestive, blood-vascular and many others. The cities in which we live are also complex systems that work in combination with other complex systems. We use systems in everyday life, we work in organizational systems, and planet Earth is a system rotating in the solar system. At the same time, we are taught from our childhood to use mostly formal logic, which in most cases succumbs to complexity and multi-pass systems. To deal efficiently with difficult situations, solve complicated problems and achieve success in various areas of life (business, health maintenance, personal relationships, sports, etc.), it is very important to learn how to operate in a systems thinking mindset and realize its importance.
Systems thinking teaches us to be modest and understand how complicated, contradictory, and unpredictable the world is. Our consciousness, even with the help of the most advanced computers, is not able to fully understand the world and estimate all the consequences of our actions, which quickly spread like ripples across water. Systems thinking provides us with the keys to understanding the world, because by concentrating on the nature of the connections between elements you can find many similar structures and rules of operation of completely different systems – financial, human, marketing, technical, and physiological. Once you understand the pattern of a functioning system, one can learn how to effectively predict its behavior and influence it. This means that systems thinking allows you, without spending years of life studying specific areas of knowledge, to understand how a variety of systems work.
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The complexity of systems can be characterized as detailed and dynamic. Detailed complexity implies that the system consists of too many parts (an example is a mosaic), and dynamic complexity implies that there are too many connections between the parts of a system, since each of the elements may be in different state at any given time (example – chess).
The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to identify its potential problems and side effects. Medicines can be safe individually, but in used in combination by a specific person with his or individual physiological properties, they can provoke an effect that will manifest itself only in a few years.
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