The Day You Learned to Think in Systems
One of the most valuable mental skills no one knows how to teach
The thought of learning how to think in systems has always been alluring to me. Given that our lives are dominated by building or interacting with systems, the idea that I can learn how to understand and navigate them better seems like a good deal.
But every time I hear someone say “learn systems thinking,” I never hear anyone lay out a clear plan for how to actually do that.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve absorbed all the material I could find on the topic, and only recently did I get why it’s so hard to learn.
The illusion of complexity
Everything in our universe can be thought of as a system. Cells, plants, humans, culture, companies, countries, or even nature itself. They vary so greatly in substance and form that the complexity seem almost infinite.
There are scientists who dedicate their whole careers to understanding a single sub-system in a cell to make better medicines.
In the diversity of systems, there lies an illusion of complexity. Instead of looking at what differentiates systems, we need to look at what unifies them. In other words, what properties exist across all systems?
How we find the unifying properties
Doing this is not easy. It requires both direct experience and theory.
Direct experience comes first. Because systems vary so much in type and scale, it’s hard to study “systems” in the abstract. We need to engage with real, specific systems and observe how they behave when we interact with them. The challenge is that systems exist at every possible scale, from single cells to the universe itself.
Humans operate within a narrow band of scale. So the most practical place to start is with systems that exist at that same scale. These include people, animals, technology, companies, and institutions.
To learn effectively, the system should be simple and respond quickly to interaction. Tight feedback loops make cause and effect visible. This is why learning programming is so useful. Programming creates an environment where you can build a system, interact with it, and immediately see the result. Write a function, hit run, and observe what changes.
I learned to program many years ago but never used it professionally. Still, it was indispensable as a way to build intuition for how systems behave.
Programming is not the only path. Being a manager is another way to develop systems intuition, since organizations are systems by necessity. The same criteria apply. The system must be observable, somewhat simple, and provide fast feedback loops.
Once you have an environment of experience you need to couple that with theory.
Direct experience alone only gets you so far. We can’t go through life trying to figure everything out from scratch. That would take too much time.
Why this series exists
This is where the gap lies.
I’ve read many books on the topic, yet few felt approachable for people who want to actually learn how to think in systems. They might exist, but if they do, they’re buried in academic articles and hard to sift through.
That’s why this article is only the first in a series on systems that I’ll be posting. There’s no strict timeline, but it will be a key pillar of what I write about going forward. I see this as central to almost any endeavor in life.
If you’re interested in reading these essays, make sure to subscribe below and you’ll be the first to see new articles.