Many people ask how they can further their learning about applied systems thinking. Depending on your experience so far, here are some recommended pathways. They include: books, articles, online courses, online videos and podcasts, and project-based coaching.
“I believe that this country needs both liberals and conservatives. And we need both traditions at their best and highest expressions, especially now.” So writes Van Jones, a highly regarded CNN political contributor, leader of numerous social and justice organizations, and former special adviser to the Obama White House, in his outstanding new book Beyond the Messy Truth. This post reviews Jones' book as it challenges liberals and conservatives alike to be true to their ideals and draw on the best of their traditions to reform the criminal justice system, stem the opioid crisis, and create 21st century jobs.
Inspired by Congressman Tim Ryan's book A Mindful Nation, this post identifies and encourages readers to cultivate connections across mindfulness, systems thinking, and public policy-making. It shows the numerous similarities between mindfulness and systems thinking, and it describes the role that both can play in facilitating not only social change but also transforming the fear-based, symptom-focused, blaming behaviors that govern an increasing part of our political discourse.
In order to lead systemic change, learn to access levers at the individual, collective or relational, and systems levels. The I/WE/IT framework enables leaders to cultivate a viewpoint of personal responsibility for change, strengthen collaborations, and identify high leverage interventions.
Whether you believe that inequity is racially and/or economically driven, the problem undermines the moral as well as social and economic fabrics of our country. This post describes several dynamics and assumptions that lead inequity to persist, and six high leverage interventions leaders can pursue to create greater equity in their communities.
How do you encourage people to think systemically when many people see it as too daunting and difficult to apply? This post identifies five obstacles to systems thinking and fourteen corresponding strategies you can use to engage people in the practice and thereby increase system-wide effectiveness in sustainable ways.
In today’s increasingly turbulent world characterized by seemingly intractable conflicts, it is helpful to learn what motivated Prsident Lincoln and how he helped the U.S. reconcile the deep divisions that erupted in the Civil War. His two primary strengths were maintaining inner stability in the midst of outer turbulence and working constructively with conflict.
Policy makers who seek to protect society from people struggling with substance abuse often end up becoming addicts themselves. They become addicted, albeit unwittingly, to quick fix solutions which temporarily address social problems but undermine society’s ability to implement more permanent and fundamental solutions.
Developing the awareness and will to make fundamental individual changes comes from thinking systemically. Developing the ability to implement these changes in service of the whole is a result of acting systemically.
Lewis Thomas, the award-winning medical essayist, observed, “When you are confronted by any complex social system … with things about it that you’re dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This is one of the sore discouragements of our time.”
Consider the following headlines all based on true stories, which epitomize Thomas’s insight:
These stories share specific characteristics:
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