Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
September 23, 2006
Systemic Thinking

Systemic Thinking by Gary Bartlett provides a nice introduction to systemic thinking compared to analysis. Analysis is very useful however, the strong tendency to focus on only breaking apart systems to analyze components does result in missing insight into improvement opportunities (that can be gained by looking at the system as a whole).

Conventional thinking techniques are fundamentally analytical. Systemic thinking is different – it combines analytical thinking with synthetical thinking.
…
That tool is synthesis – seeing how things work together. Synthesis is more than putting things back together again after you’ve taken them apart: It’s understanding how things work together.

Analytical thinking enables us to understand the parts of the situation. Synthetical thinking enables us to understand how they work together.

Related: articles by Russell Ackoff - blog posts on systems thinking

Leave a Reply



« Incentive Programs are Ineffective
Manufacturing Jobs »

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2009 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags


Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Jaky Astik: Where there are no problems there is no leadership, because then, no one cares.
  • Tim McMahon: Your post and Shaun’s comments are quite right. I think the there is an evoluation in thinking as...
  • Richard Kunkle, MD: Great blog. What is intriguing here is that we as physicians have focused here on the needs of...
  • Josh: When I buy a car, I want to be able to drive the car to work/home which is about a 20 minute commute each way...
  • Alex: Wow, Google has done it again. This is truly going to change the dynamics of communication as we know it today....
  • Anonymous: We should all be grateful that Toyota is helping out the US economy. My cousin landed a job with Toyota...
  • Oscar: That’s pretty cool from one side but 4 hours to refill the tank is too much time i think. I’d...
  • shaun sayers: This is quite a significant issue Jon, and there is a fine balance to be found On the one hand I...

Archives

September 2006
M T W T F S S
« Aug   Oct »
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930