The Art of Systems Thinking: Essential Skills for Creativity and Problem Solving

✍ Scribed by Joseph O'Connor,Ian McDermott

• Publisher: Thorsons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 286
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What is Systems Thinking? Systems thinking goes beyond logic, because people are not always logical. Systems thinking sees beyond isolated events to the deeper patterns and connections.

This book explains the principles of systems thinking in a straightforward way with practical applications, exercises and examples that will help you become more influential and successful in managing your health, work, finances and relationships.

This book will show you how: you can get a huge result for a small effort, obvious solutions can often do more harm than good, to avoid recurrent misfortunes that seem to happen automatically, to know the best time to change strategy, your attempted solution can cause the problem you are trying to solve, and you can never do just one thing because there are always side effects.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One - Thinking Past the Obvious
1. What is a System?
2. Thinking in Circles
Part Two - Making Mental Maps
3. Mental Models
4. Cause and Effect
5. Beyond Logic
Part Three - Thinking in New Ways
6. Learning
7. Perspectives
Part Four - Drawing Conclusions
Mapping your intuitions
Storytime
Running on the Spot
Limits to Natural Resources
Inner and Outer Limits
Weight Control
Moving the Goal Posts
Credit and Debt
Repairng the Damage, Again and Again...
When the Cure is Worse than the Disease
Life is Like a Poker Game
The Monopoly Pattern
The Tragedy of the Commons
Part Five - Closing the Circle
Make Connections
You Never Just Do One Thing
Results Are Not Proportional to Effort
A System Works as Well as its Weakest Link
Time Delays
Part Six - Resources
A brief history of systems thinking
Bibliography
Resources
Glossary
Training
Index
About the Authors