Nicole, there's much to appreciate here—particularly the distinction between entry and command, between operating within a system and understanding how systems behave. That's genuinely useful.
A small historical note: systems thinking as practice was substantially developed by Peter Checkland through his Soft Systems Methodology in the 1970s and 80s, building on Geoffrey Vickers' work on appreciative systems. Project management has been wrestling with these ideas for decades. Checkland made the crucial move from "hard" systems engineering to something that acknowledged human systems require participation, not detached analysis.
But I want to raise something deeper, prompted by your rubric: "I like mental models and complex projects."
Your main argument—there are many models, choose the appropriate one for the situation—is sound advice. But it operates entirely within map-land. Even the most carefully selected model remains a map. And maps have a way of being surreptitiously substituted for reality unless we remain hyper-vigilant.
Here's what I mean. In my early forties, my squash game and skiing both improved dramatically when I encountered Tim Gallwey's Inner Game books. His techniques aren't meditation or philosophy—they're practical tricks that keep attention anchored in embodied participation. Watch how the ball is spinning at the moment it contacts the racket. Feel which part of your foot takes the greatest strain in a turn. The analytical mind can't capture reality when attention is fully engaged with something actually happening rather than a representation of what might happen.
This suggests a question your piece points toward but doesn't quite ask: what would it mean for systems thinking itself to remain embodied—to stay in participatory relationship with the messy, entangled reality it models, rather than becoming another elegant map we mistake for the territory?
I think this question sits right at the heart of what I was trying to get at in Where Systems Thinking Really Comes From. For me, systems thinking only works when it changes how judgment is formed in real time, not just which models we apply after the fact. Otherwise it becomes another elegant abstraction.
What this surfaces is that systems thinking is a different compression regime for judgment. Slowing down changes which patterns get noticed before action locks them in. Without that pause, people end up optimizing locally while misreading the system globally.
I really appreciate your emphasis on "slowing down." This is the essential antidote to what I call the anthropocentric reflex, the instinct that often prevents well-trained systems thinkers from becoming true systems practitioners
Nicole, there's much to appreciate here—particularly the distinction between entry and command, between operating within a system and understanding how systems behave. That's genuinely useful.
A small historical note: systems thinking as practice was substantially developed by Peter Checkland through his Soft Systems Methodology in the 1970s and 80s, building on Geoffrey Vickers' work on appreciative systems. Project management has been wrestling with these ideas for decades. Checkland made the crucial move from "hard" systems engineering to something that acknowledged human systems require participation, not detached analysis.
But I want to raise something deeper, prompted by your rubric: "I like mental models and complex projects."
Your main argument—there are many models, choose the appropriate one for the situation—is sound advice. But it operates entirely within map-land. Even the most carefully selected model remains a map. And maps have a way of being surreptitiously substituted for reality unless we remain hyper-vigilant.
Here's what I mean. In my early forties, my squash game and skiing both improved dramatically when I encountered Tim Gallwey's Inner Game books. His techniques aren't meditation or philosophy—they're practical tricks that keep attention anchored in embodied participation. Watch how the ball is spinning at the moment it contacts the racket. Feel which part of your foot takes the greatest strain in a turn. The analytical mind can't capture reality when attention is fully engaged with something actually happening rather than a representation of what might happen.
This suggests a question your piece points toward but doesn't quite ask: what would it mean for systems thinking itself to remain embodied—to stay in participatory relationship with the messy, entangled reality it models, rather than becoming another elegant map we mistake for the territory?
I think this question sits right at the heart of what I was trying to get at in Where Systems Thinking Really Comes From. For me, systems thinking only works when it changes how judgment is formed in real time, not just which models we apply after the fact. Otherwise it becomes another elegant abstraction.
What this surfaces is that systems thinking is a different compression regime for judgment. Slowing down changes which patterns get noticed before action locks them in. Without that pause, people end up optimizing locally while misreading the system globally.
Perfectly said.
I really appreciate your emphasis on "slowing down." This is the essential antidote to what I call the anthropocentric reflex, the instinct that often prevents well-trained systems thinkers from becoming true systems practitioners
Thank you!
Great post! 💡
Thank you!
It does help! Thank you for articulating this so well.