Why Systems Thinking?

Sustainability problems are what is known as wicked problems. There are formal definitions of wicked problems (e.g., Rittel & Weber, 1973; Conklin, 2006) but generally speaking they are problems that require many different people to be involved, we have incomplete information, the requirements can be contradictory or changing, and there is no single solution. I would add to this that wicked problems generally require a culture shift. Although this isn't commonly acknowledged within the literature on wicked problems, all of the problems that we define as wicked like climate change, addiction, and inequity have ways of thinking and knowing that influence them. For example, we might agree that we need a program to support people suffering from addiction but factors like whether we believe that addiction is caused by differences in brain function or by lack of learned impulse control will impact how we design addiction support programs.

They are called wicked because they are actually resistant to being resolved.

Let's take two problems as examples.

Not Wicked: I have trouble getting up in the morning

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

While to me, this is a pretty challenging problem, in relation to wicked problems this one is pretty easy for me to solve. I can easily collect data on things like when I go to bed, how long it takes me to get to sleep, and how many times I wake up during the night. Then, without consulting anyone else I can try some different solutions like going to bed early, starting or stopping a bedtime snack, wearing headphones while I sleep or using a white noise generator app, and trying a wake up light.

I will experiment until I feel like I'm finding success and then hopefully I will continue the habits that created that success.

Wicked: We want to end homelessness in Edmonton

Image by Simon Law, CC BY-SA 2.0

There are different types of homelessness that need to be addressed (chronic and episodic), there are many different stakeholders and partners, homelessness can be connected to availability of affordable housing, unemployment, support for physical and mental health concerns, etc.

How do we experiment with the different factors? How do we know how much we need to change each element? How do we know that we have ended homelessness?

(Western) Traditional Problem Solving

In Western traditions of problem-solving, we tend to break things down, or reduce them, to their parts and then look at the parts individually. This approach ignores the interconnections between the different parts that result in at least some of the characteristics of the whole. The following video explains this concept and how systems thinking introduces a new approach.

SUST 201

If you are currently in SUST 201, your next activity will be to complete the short reading from Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows. This reading is available in your course website (Blackboard) in both audio and text forms. To help guide you through the excerpt, please use the guided notes sheet posted on the course site.

If you are not a current SUST 201 student the reading is:

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems: A Primer. (D. Wright, Ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing. You need to cover system purpose, elements, interconnections, feedback loops, and leverage points.

Think and reflect

Can you think of a time when you have tried to solve a problem that seems to be resistant to change? You know that there's an issue but you haven't been able to do anything about it? What strategies have you tried to solve the problem? Do you think these strategies demonstrate reductionist or systems thinking?

Continue to The Parts of a System

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Munro, T. (2021). Introduction to Systems Thinking. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/view/intro-to-systems-thinking/home. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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