Systems Thinking Quotes

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.

The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature.

To fix India's healthcare scenario, what is most needed is 'systems thinking.' For far too long, India has followed a vertical approach in its health sector, which translated into disease-specific national programmes being set up.

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.

[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

Scientists say every action initiates an equal and opposite reaction. I say that's just the start. I say every action initiates a most unequal and upredictable chain reaction, that every filament of living becomes part of a larger weave, while remaining identifiable. That every line of latitude requires several stripes of longitude to obtain meaning. That every universe is part of a bigger heaven, a heaven of rhythm and geometry, where a heartbeat is the apex of a triangle.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

I have absolutely no idea about space exploration. I'm a software guy. But because I'm a non-expert, I've been able to bring the software concept of modularity into the space sector, which was never done before.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

Ask "why" until there is no more "why."

I have a different way of thinking. I think synergistically. I'm not linear in thinking, I'm not very logical.

You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley's idea that 'Life is just one damn relatedness after another' "So you must have the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness.

Anybody who has been in a relationship, raised a family, worked in business or been a systems analyst, you have to look at how the whole system works together. You have to find those opportunities to collaborate.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.