For a long time I believed that systems thinking was something that has only recently come on the scene. I was quite surprised to learn that systems thinking originated in 1956, when Professor Jay Forrester founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT's Sloan School of Management. But I remained convinced that it was something to which I had never been exposed until a few years ago when I co-authored an article for the publication “The Systems Thinker”.
But today I was looking at the “17 practices of systems thinking” which appear in the article in that publication by Nalani Linder and Jeffrey Frakes called “A New Path to Understanding Systems Thinking”. It is a pretty meaty article.
The list of 17 practices include things like looking for patterns in data and trends across time and number 17, “Recognizing that a system’s structure drives its behavior” And suddenly I saw the face of Marshall McLuhan before my eyes. Yes, the man who said “The Medium is the Message” was telling us in the 1960s that Tv is not just an enhancement of radio and movies impact us differently from TV. Back then he couldn’t even consider the impacts of Internet, Facebook, SnapChat, etc.
But he was alerting us that each means of communication has inherent differences in how it impacts the users of that medium. Email which once seemed fast, is now regarded as slow and so I have learned that that way to get the attention of my sons is through a text message or WhatsApp.
So I was excited to see that some media people are getting the message – and I am not just talking about Netflix compared to the legacy TV networks. Kayla Christopherson and Cole Goins published an article in 21st Century Journalism entitled “How Systems Thinking Can Transform Journalism”. In it they employ a model from the Northwest Earth Institute which implores journalism to not just report events but to look for patterns and trends, underlying causes and the prejudicial programming we all have when looking at a situation. Is it not exactly that which causes one observer to see a poor person committing a crime because “that is what they do” while another sees the social issues which may force the criminal to act in a certain way?
Police now admit that the eyewitness is not a great witness because we see what we want to see, we remember what we are programmed to remember and therefore we lack the objectivity to provide reliable witnessing.
If we know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, can we train ourselves to take a closer look at everything around us and ask our journalists, law enforcement and politicians to do the same?