Systems Thinking: Coping with 21st Century Problems (Boardman, Sauser, 2008)

Coping with 21st Century Problems

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book for Both Aspiring and Experienced Practitioners, March 24, 2008
By Lawrence John (Arlington, VA)

Don't let this relatively slim volume's chatty tone fool you into thinking it's a lightweight treatment. Its 200 pages can fly by, but Boardman and Sauser have deftly woven substantial threads into a complex, important tapestry. Like Magical Max's pills, it may take a little time for each new thread and combination to achieve full potency. True to their vision of systems thinking as both an abstract and applied discipline, they thoughtfully jump start this mulling-over process by providing a challenging set of exercises after each chapter. And they'll happily share the benefits of your thinking process with others as part of their "Worlds of Systems" web site.

Beginning systems thinkers will gain a down-to-earth understanding of many of the fundamentals of this challenging subject while discovering some straightforward tools to help use them effectively. Serious students and practitioners from all disciplines will find deeper levels of challenge and insight, including the beginnings of Boardman and Sauser's new research into the value of paradox as an essential systems thinking tool. Both types of reader will find themselves repeatedly drawn back to this beguiling web of concepts and ideas to recognize new pictures and opportunities at both the system and "system of systems" levels.

The primary delivery vehicle for all this value is a broad-ranging set of case studies drawn from business, academia, the military, government and, of course, engineering. These are liberally spiced up by, of all things, movie references that make a series of points every bit as profound and important as more classical works in a much more entertaining package. (Full disclosure: the reviewer is both a mid-career graduate student of, and research collaborator with, the authors, and is very thoughtfully credited in the acknowledgments.)

p.2 Systems thinking is a deliberate attempt to think when thinking itself is put at risk by emotion, confusion, and confrontation... Systems thinking does not suppress or supplant perspectives; it adopts them and finds sense in their multiplicity and diversity, their surprise. It does not guarantee success, but it does make thinking possible when that seems impossible. [JLJ - seems like a good concept for game theory]

p.5 These then are three foci for our thought process: profiling the need, identifying the candidates, and adopting a selection mechanism. And for systems thinkers these thought foci interact. They are parts of a wider system. They have relationships, such that changes in any one can affect others, and in ways that might cause the relationships between them to change. And it is the whole of these foci, whatever that might be, that constitutes the system of thinking.

p.22 Gerry Weinberg writes: "Every model is ultimately the expression of one thing we think we hope to understand in terms of another that we think we do understand."

p.23 There is something simply inescapable about the notion of boundary... The boundary separates the outside from the inside... Boundaries define the area of responsibility and the scope of interest. They tell us what are the things people can do something about (or not) and the things we can be properly focused upon (or not).

p.56-57 a model is an abstraction of reality... they are fundamentally wrong because they are not reality... model creation should force us to scrutinize the relevance and significance of perspective... In our view, no model should be built unless we know what we are looking at, why we are looking at it, from where (which standpoint) we are looking at, and what it is we believe we can see better because we will have the model.

p.86 The conceptual model, pertinent to a root definition, is an account of the activities that the system must do in order to be the system named. The structural elements for the model are derived from the root definition

p.87 nothing ought to be included in the model that cannot be justified by reference to the root definition.

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