Difference between revisions of "Category:Systems Thinking"

One of the most valuable skills you can take from studying the environment is that it helps you to think about systems as a whole.

Excellent video overview of our current systems status: Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems. TEDtalk

General historical overview.

History of Cybernetics (video)

Systems Wiki has many fine resources, including free Insightmaker software.

Five minute overview of basic systems concepts.

People

Gregory Bateson In the 1970s, he served as a lecturer and fellow of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was married to Margaret Meade. You can see his papers and video at Special Collections. An Ecology of Mind is a new documentary, a portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, and systems theorist. His story is lovingly told by his youngest daughter, Nora, with footage from Gregory’s own films shot in the 1930s with Margaret Mead in Bali and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews. Link. Bateson was a man who studied the interrelationships of the complex systems we live in with scientific rigor and enormous integrity. Nora’s discovery of her father’s work documents the vast and continuing influence his thinking has had on an amazingly wide range of disciplines.

Stewart Brand is a systems thinker par excellence. Brand, the center hub of the human network, has a new book, Whole Earth Discipline. He's putting the whole book online for free, with annotations and a reading list link. He makes some stands that are heretical to mainstream greens (pro-nuke and GMO). Those who heard Fred Turner's plenary talk last year will have some sense of how important Brand has been and continues to be. He lobbied to get NASA to release the first picture of Earth from space, predicting its iconic power to unite and inspire. Because of his work with Gov Brown, CA uses half the energy per capita as the rest of US (comparable to EU), and he's working on a 10K year clock.

James Lovelock is creator of the Gaia Hypothesis (the earth as self-regulating superorganism) and author of The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, video of talk. 9/10 [1]. radio interview (also includes Stewart Brand on climate change and nuclear energy).

Joanna Macy is an "eco-philosopher, is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology (short video definition). A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application." Video on Great Turning. Coming Back to Life : Practice to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World / Joanna Macy, Molly Young Brown 1998 Location McH Stacks GF80 .M33 1998. 2010 Bioneers keynote video.

Donella Meadows archive of her articles, one of the best being the 12 Leverage Points. See also her 2008 book Thinking in Systems: A Primer Table of Contents. In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows audio interview 2004 have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update. summary pdf. A newer book, Dancing With Systems.

Peter Senge The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Bryan Smith, Peter M. Senge, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley.

Naomi Ehrich Leonard, marine roboticist. A Princeton University professor, won a MacArthur Genius grant. Leonard constructs autonomous underwater vehicles that mimic flocking birds and assist in the understanding of ocean dynamics article

Video

Five minute overview of basic systems concepts.

A more indepth series of videos by Dr. Russell Ackoff provides a very understandable introduction to Systems Thinking.

The Short Attention Span Science Video on systems and sustainability. Example: resilience.

MacArthur Genius award winner Saul Griffith, at X Prize, calls for a systems science for design, Terrarium Science (video).

Systems Traps

Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn't feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems. He knows that more information can lead to a better, simpler solution. Illustrating the tips and tricks for breaking down big issues, he distills an overwhelming infographic on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to a few elementary points. TEDtalk

Johan Rockstrom has found nine systems/ "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems. TEDtalk

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe. TEDtalk video

Are Humans Smarter than Yeast? explores the notion of exponential growth to environment.

Deborah Gordon studies ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She asks: How do these chitinous creatures get down to business -- and even multitask when they need to -- with no language, memory or visible leadership? Her answers could lead to a better understanding of all complex systems, from the brain to the Web. TEDtalk video.

Nicholas Christakis (see his book below) explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact, for example predict epidemics. TEDtalk video. Related: obesity study.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. short video 4/10

The Big Picture, why complexity matters. Rees TEDtalk.

David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to present day. TEDtalk video.

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict. Tedtalk.

Tim Flannery explores how Darwinian ideas got distorted, and how cooperation and slf-organization matters, and why there's hope. Link 4/11

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons. TEDtalk video.

Benoit Mandelbrot is the pioneer of fractals, a broad and powerful tool in the study of many forms of roughness, in nature and in humanity's works -- including even art. TEDtalk video. More on fractals, including how they show up in African culture.

Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain. TEDtalk****

Audio

Random Rules: The basic processes of life are actually extremely sloppy. More on this theme from RadioLab

The Good Show In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

In his book The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher talks about swarm intelligence — where the collective ideas of a group add up to better solutions than any individual could have dreamed up, including an example of how UPS reorganized its driving routes using the logic of an ant colony. (interview)

Articles

Systems Thinker Donella Meadows has written a concise, easy to understand article on the importance of visions (pdf). This article invites us to think big and outside the box, especially regarding the sustainable world they want to create.

A brilliant essay by Meadows 12 leverage point to intervene in a system and summary

Macy, J. and Brown, M. provide a good introduction as well, relating systems thinking to spiritual practices.

An Overview of how to think in systems, perhaps using software support.

Cooperation and altruism are more powerful and common in complex systems. "Survival of the Fittest" is commonly misunderstood. More on this can be found on Good News page.

Books

Emergence by Steven Johnson review interview.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler. TEDtalk by Christakis.

The Building Blocks of Wholeness adapted from Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Properties from his Nature of Order Google book preview

Nexus Mark Buchanan. Recent talk (video) based on The Social Atom book blog

Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell Summary: sometimes change can come very quickly in unpredictable ways and from very small beginnings. (unrelated TEDtalk).

The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Bryan Smith, Peter M. Senge, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley.

The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) by Ervin Laszlo New York, G. Braziller [1972] S&E Stacks Q295.L37 Amazon preview)

Systems Thinking : Coping with 21st Century Problems / John Boardman, Brian Sauser (seems engineering oriented) Boca Raton, FL : CRC Press, c2008 S&E Stacks TA168 .B594 2008

Thinking Through Systems Thinking / Ion Georgiou London ; New York : Routledge, 2007 View contents online S&E Stacks Q295 .G465 2007

Systems Thinking Basics : From Concepts to Casual Loops / Virginia Anderson and Lauren Johnson Cambridge, Mass. : Pegasus Communications, c1997 McH Stacks HD30.19 .A53 1997

Systems Thinking Tools : A User's Reference Guide / by Daniel H. Kim Cambridge, MA : Pegasus Communications, Inc., c1995 McH Stacks HD31 .K55 1995

Managing Complex Systems : Thinking Outside the Box / Howard Eisner Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley, c2005 S&E Stacks TA168 .E387 2005

The Key to Sustainable Cities : Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems / Gwendolyn Hallsmith Published Gabriola Island, B.C. : New Society Publishers, c2003 McH Stacks HT166 .H359 2003

The Web of Life : A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems / Fritjof Capra (contains an introduction to systems thinking by the author of The Tao of Physics) S&E Stacks QH501 .C375 1996

A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber (not scholarly, but does integrate environmental thinking).

From System Complexity to Emergent Properties By M. A. Aziz-Alaoui, C. Bertelle (technical)

Social Networks have some very interesting properties. Christakis and Fowler's book Connected, also see TEDtalk.

The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics by Dennis Sewell. Darwin's "survival of the fittest" has been widely misconstrued.