I think that Thinking Systemically means that you can see everything in a system. It means you can look at a whole issue, identifying smaller details and the whole picture.

To successfully Think Systemically you must gather information about each part of a system, making sure not to skip details as they may contain evidence or facts that end up helping you in the long run. By Thinking Systemically, you will have an easier time coming up with solutions for your problems. You can use these solutions to start figuring out actions and steps you need to take in order to solve an issue.

Thinking Systemically relates to me because whenever I make a film or other project about an issue I need to remember to find the greater issue and then look into smaller issues that could come from it. This is important because I can collect information that can help increase my knowledge about the problem and aid me in figuring out a solution. Whenever I make a film about real topics I need information backed up by evdience and I can’t necessarily stay on one part of a system the entire time. 

Another way I use this sustainability skill in my filming is when I plan my shots and script. If I chose a scene to film that requires me to animate for a long time I need to make sure that neither my family nor I have any plans for that day. If I don’t do this, then I will end up having to miss out on these plans or skip filming which could lead to a lot more issues. Both of these things are not ideal and can be avoided if I Think Systematically and find out about things we need to do beforehand, then plan out my filming shoots so I won't run into any of these problems.

When I first came to SEEQS I had no idea what Thinking Systemically meant. In 6th grade I was confused on how to see a full system and understand everything. part of it. The closest thing I did was creating systems maps which also confused me. This thinking lasted me until around the middle of the year when I started EQS Identity. We had a major systems map project where I learned my place in my community and everyone’s place in a system. I learned that everything connects and everyone has a part in their community. Now I understand these things and I am able to look at the bigger picture and see how things affect each other in a system as well as the order of which things work in one, I am able to apply this sustainability skill to real life.

A good example of a project that helped me develop my ability to think systemically was the showbiz Murder Mystery project in 8th grade. The main idea of this project was to write a play as a class and film it to make a movie. 

Before we started this project, we learned about major factors to understand when making a story, such as Freytag’s pyramid:

This project connects to Thinking Systemically and is a good AND bad example of it because we had to understand all the parts of making a story into a movie and how one factor can throw off the whole system. We learned this the hard way because throughout the whole production we almost completely forgot about a really important part of the system of creating a movie, Time. Time is usually thought of as something that relates to Managing Effectively since this skill is completely related to how you manage your time, however I believe that Thinking Systemically also has a relationship with time. If we think the same way a systems map is created then the “Amount of Time” is one of the nodes in our system. As the amount of time you have left goes down, stress and anxiety levels go up as well as the amount of rushed or less quality work. Time is a tricky node (Especially for movies) because there are ALWAYS due dates and you most likely won’t be able to change these. Because the amount of time you have left can’t increase it is EXTREMELY important to make sure you aren’t doing things that will decrease the amount of time you have left AND decrease the work that has been done for your project. This is important because the quality   

Because most of us didn’t realize the impact that goofing and slacking off had on the amount of time to work on our project, which led to us not being able to get our film done.

Another way this project connects to Thinking Systemically is the roles that we played during the process of making the story. We all had the same amount of power when it came to brainstorming, so if you goofed off and/or ruined the document then you would mess up the whole system. This also goes for the story itself. A story is kind of like a system. We have a beginning, middle and end so if something happens in the beginning but is never brought back in the end of the story then the whole production will feel off. We worked around this issue by discussing with the other groups to find areas in our parts of the story that didn’t match up. 

This project helped me understand problems in filmmaking that connect to Thinking Systemically which will help me not make these mistakes in the future. Because of this I will work on thinking about the whole system that is affected by my mistakes and find new ways to understand the consequences that come from my actions.