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Rethinking Thinking: Systems
DOI link for Rethinking Thinking: Systems
Rethinking Thinking: Systems book
Rethinking Thinking: Systems
DOI link for Rethinking Thinking: Systems
Rethinking Thinking: Systems book
ABSTRACT
Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, or body of knowledge and tools, that has been developed over the past 50 years to make the structure of systems and patterns of change clearer so we can better understand their behavior and solve problems more effectively. The term is often used to describe a new way of interpreting the world and our work in it. This new way of thinking began in the 1950s and was known as General Systems Theory (GST). GST studied many systems to see if they had common underlying principles of operation. While only moderately successful, GST was able to identify many insights and observations that help understand how systems work. In the 1960s, Systems Dynamics was introduced by J. W. Forrester (1971) at MIT as a way of analyzing systems by finding their influence elements and feedback loops and modeling them on computers to simulate the systems behavior. Then in early 1991, MIT’s Peter Senge (1990) published his seminal book The Fifth Discipline that made systems thinking a popular subject with managers throughout the world. Systems thinking is now widely used in management and organizations to understand how things interact and affect each other and to provide a broader perspective of work and organizations that improves problem-solving, decision-making, and overall performance.