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Critical Thinking

Learning Systems Thinking

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Essential nonlinear skills for software professionals

Course outcomes

  • Understand what systems thinking is, the qualities of a systems thinker, and how systems thinking skills can help your career
  • Recognize the common mistakes you make when solving systems problems and how systems thinking can help
  • Practice the three levels of systems thinking and develop a strategy for improving those skills over time

Course description

Software systems and the organizations that create them have become increasingly complex and interconnected, and yet our ways of thinking about them have not changed much.

Join expert Diana Montalion to explore systems thinking, a set of tools and practices that can help you holistically grasp how all the pieces of a software system or organization connect, interact, and influence outcomes. You’ll learn to identify systems goals that are meaningfully connected to the context, understand how interrelated and interdependent parts act together to create patterns, create conceptual models to guide impactful decisions, and much more.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Understand the fundamentals of systems thinking in the software systems context
  • Use the iceberg model to dive deeper into events, patterns, and mental models that lead to recurring problems
  • Improve your thinking through self-awareness and continuous learning
  • Communicate well-reasoned ideas and theories in the midst of uncertainty

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a technologist who integrates differing expertise and experience into recommendations or solutions.
  • You work with multiple teams, tools, or siloed software parts and want to create a cohesive understanding about the system and changes that benefit it.
  • You want to become a trustworthy leader who thinks well with others.
  • You want to foster an environment where people can arrive together at strong, cross-functional, insightful conclusions with little top-down governance.

Prerequisites

Recommended preparation:

  • Have a word processor or a pen and paper

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

What is systems thinking? (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Introduction to systems thinking; linear and nonlinear thinking; qualities, practices, and capabilities of a systems thinker; systems thinking career ladder
  • Hands-on exercise: Write for three minutes on the qualities you think matter most to cultivate
  • Group discussion: How big a problem do you think a lack of systems thinking is?; share a few words from your writing

How relationships produce effect (35 minutes)

  • Presentation: The iceberg model; basic systems model (reducing discrepancy over time); conceptual integrity and why it’s important; sociotechnical, time, and counterintuitiveness factors
  • Hands-on exercise: Write for three minutes about your experience with a current, recurrent challenge in the relationships between parts of the system (people or technology); using the iceberg model, consider the challenge you identified
  • Q&A
  • Break

Improving your ability to think and communicate ideas (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Metacognition; practices that improve the quality of your thinking (deep work, self-awareness, writing as thinking)
  • Hands-on exercise: Write for three minutes about the practice you’ll try and how you’ll support it
  • Group discussion: Share the challenges you face doing deep work and how you might support yourself

Learning to respond (15 minutes)

  • Group discussion: Things that are the most upsetting when you think with others; ways you settle down your reactions and give yourself space to think
  • Presentation: Learning how to respond rather than react; what the Beer Game taught us about systems thinking; opinion-driven cultures; working with doubt; how to drop reactions and recognize fallacies
  • Hands-on exercise: Spot the logical fallacy

Systemic reasoning (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: How to build a recommendation when you can’t know the right thing to do; supporting an idea, action, or theory with systemic reasoning; strengthening the reasoning; designing feedback loops
  • Hands-on exercise: Write an idea, action, or theory related to the problem you identified earlier
  • Q&A
  • Break

Modeling events and relationships (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: How to work with others to understand a system; modeling exercises
  • Group discussion: How often do you model cross-functionally?; obstacles to collective modeling and how you overcome them
  • Hands-on exercise: Write for three minutes on the activity you’re going to try and how you’ll set it up

Leverage points—places to intervene (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Determining leverage points; list of places to intervene in a system
  • Group discussion: Share examples of how the paradigm has shifted in your experience

Mago’s quandary (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: A story based on real-world events; example of a software system in crisis; examples of systems-thinking activities in response to the crisis; using the iceberg model to consider Mago’s challenge
  • Group discussion: Where would you begin?; What’s the root challenge?

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Your Instructor

  • Diana Montalion

    Diana Montalion is the founder of Mentrix Group, which provides systems architecture services and workshops on nonlinear approaches. She’s also working on a book titled Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Non-linear Skills and Practices for Software Professionals. Diana has more than 17 years of experience delivering transformative initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, the Gates Foundation, and Teach For All. She has served as principal systems architect for The Economist and the Wikimedia Foundation. When Diana was young, learning was her favorite hobby. She’s developed courses in writing, improv, programming, systems architecture, and thinking in systems. As global training chair for Drupalcon, she helped international teams of experts develop popular training courses.

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