30+ Types of Systems Thinking

John Spacey, August 19, 2016 updated on October 31, 2022

Systems thinking is the process of considering the broad end-to-end impact of change to systems. Systems are things that are composed of many elements that interact in complex ways such as a galaxy, solar system, planet, ocean, ecosystem, society, economy, city, market, organization or organism. Generally speaking, these can't be understood with basic approaches such as analysis. As such, system thinking requires specialized approaches such as:

Abductive Reasoning	Abstraction
Backward Induction	Cascading Failure
Chaos Theory	Complexity
Complexity Cost	Context
Deductive Reasoning	Design Thinking
Downward Spiral	Elegance
Emergence	Forward Thinking
Global Change	Holism
Inductive Reasoning	Known Unknowns
New Complexity	Opportunity Cost
Organizational Complexity	Positive Feedback Loop
Randomness	Real World
Slippery Slope	Spontaneous Order
Sum Of Parts	System Of Systems
Systems Perspective	Systems Theory
Unintended Consequences	Unknown Unknowns

Solutions to systems problems require elegance such that they may be perceived as simple. For example, a circular economy is the theory that many environmental problems can be solved by not releasing anything that isn't food into the environment. Elegant solutions to bizarrely complex problems is characteristic of systems thinking.

Systems thinking is based on systems theory and related fields such as chaos theory.

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