A Lifetime of Systems Thinking
thesystemsthinker.com
thesystemsthinker.com
i was musing about this the other day... split the day between teaching and learning (probably alternating by hour): teach the grade below you and learn from the grade above you. teachers would mainly guide the teachers and set the agenda. the student teachers can grade papers, with adult teachers spot checking their grading.
> "...the internal market economy..."
some chinese companies, notably haier, used some form of the internal market economy to become multinational behemoths. your group would only be successful if you added enough value to the internal value chain that another group would "buy" your product, with the external customer as the final arbiter in the chain.
> "The best thing that can be done to a problem is to solve it. False. The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment so as to eliminate the problem."
problem definition implicitly frames a situation and thereby narrows the window of possible solutions. i've learned to look for these kinds of solutions because those kinds of solutions tend to be the most effective. when you want to stop a bad habit, don't focus on the stopping. create a world where the habit is unnecessary.
As a teacher, I think this is an interesting proposal. It definitely would help a lot, and the ones teaching would get a firmer grasp on the material without a doubt. I wonder if it could be integrated into something like Sal Kahn's model, however. Say, kids watch lectures at home, and then kids in the higher class help them work through problems, with teacher guidance to explain in more depth for curious students and to help work through problems.
There's a few issues I see with this, however, the main one being timing. There's only so many hours in a day, and if kids are going to both learn and teach, we'll have to cut down on something in the high school curriculum. Sadly, I fear this would mostly be electives or humanities classes, two things which are still needed. The other issue would be what to do with final year students. Would they only teach, or would they still need learning too? Ideally, they could get an internship, but who knows how that would really work, especially in rural areas/areas without many job opportunities.
but if necessary, maybe performing arts could be pushed to non-profits to administer outside of school (as is often the case already).
and i'd suspect final year students would help teach each other in electives. maybe get freshmen from college majoring in the subject. in college, teaching assistants are often only a couple years ahead of you anyway.
i was just imagining how one room schoolhouses of yore (like on little house on the prairie) would work. =)
Hmm, that could be interesting, especially if the mastery is tested in the second half of the year. That would allow you to do the concepts you learned in the first half and bring those into the stuff you learned the previous year...But it could also be a huge gap between actually learning the concepts and then putting them to use teaching someone else. Maybe have it alternating years, where, say, freshmen are teaching 8th graders the first half, then being taught the second half. And that class keeps their schedule of first half teaching, second half being taught as they progress, with the year before and after having the opposite one.
> but if necessary, maybe performing arts could be pushed to non-profits to administer outside of school (as is often the case already).
The issue with this is that many would never get exposure to them, then. And people need exposure to it (we need to be well-rounded, basically; STEM people need more humanities and humanities people need more STEM). Plus, with people pushing other extra curriculurs (sports!) that take up a lot of school time, it's hard to see many choosing these.
Like, my hometown has an art guild, but few students do anything with it, sadly. It's quite a neat place. But they do a lot during school, and I'd hate to deprive that chance for those who are interested (and good). For some kids, it might be what keeps them coming to school and encourages them. Who knows? Plus, this would hurt rural areas quite a lot. But, I think the half-year plan mentioned above makes this point moot.
>and i'd suspect final year students would help teach each other in electives. maybe get freshmen from college majoring in the subject. in college, teaching assistants are often only a couple years ahead of you anyway.
That'd be an option...if you lived near a university.
It's a trade-off between breadth and depth.
Teaching increases depth and internalization, but it also can't be done when there's too many subject to cover.
When I was growing up, high school students took 9 subjects on average. In contrast, a high school teacher only teaches 1-4 subjects.
In peer instruction[1], the lecturer asks a question, students each commit to an answer (eg using clickers, or held-up cards), then turn to discuss the question with peers, and then do another commit. In computer-supported peer instruction, when students turn to discuss the question with peers, an app tells each student which of their neighboring students to talk with, based on the students' recent clicker answers, to maximize productive discussion.
So for the future, perhaps we could do better than dividing teaching from learning by hour or day or year; better than partitioning teachers from learners by grade. Perhaps instead imagine dynamic minute-by-minute formation and dissolution of variously-sized groups for optimized and personalized learning.
AI: "Hmm, student A's puzzlement will soon exceed their frustration target profile, and student B just figured it out and is enthused, and student A-B pairings have a history of going well in this situation... message: 'A,B: I suggest you pair'".
Prior art? If your interest is in patents, my fuzzy understanding is Mazur regrettably took a familiar path. Unable to get follow-on research funding on the topic, he created a startup, with Harvard patent(s) (on what exactly I must of course avoid knowing) for table stakes and moat. The startup of course failed, and was acquired by a large dysfunctional education incumbent for the anticompetitive "value" of the patents. Leaving society arguably much worse off than if the original physics education research had never been funded at all.
It's my fear that the conjunction of education with computer-human hybrid processes, and with with AR/VR, given the regulatory capture of patent policy, and plummeting ordinary skill levels, is creating a toxic stew of patents that will profoundly impede innovation in education in the US for many years.
Thank you.
> "Schools are upside down. Students should be teaching, and teachers at all levels should learn no matter how much they resist doing so." i was musing about this the other day... split the day between teaching and learning (probably alternating by hour): teach the grade below you
Interesting idea but not so easy to do right: my wife when she was young had to teach her (much younger) little brother: the result? She was doing his homework instead of teaching him how to do it: much easier for her of course..
If you haven't read any of John Holt's books, they might interest you.
On a related note, Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows is one of my favorite books.
There's a way to the analysis of a system or a model that you can get on an intuitive level (or even, on a formal level, given where most of the HN readership works or has interests), but the exposition in TiS goes further, and tries to make you think not only on all the sources acting on a system, but how you could get to build or adapt a system for a specific objective.
See? What I wrote above makes just marginal sense. It's not a complicated book, it's an enjoyable read but the concepts inside go deeper than what I could get into something that makes much sense.
I ask because I've read some systems thinking books (e.g. Systemantics) that were difficult to apply in real life. I come from the perspective of someone with a systems/theory builder personality. The only systems thinking book that I found remotely practical was The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.
The most useful piece of short writing on systems thinking that I've come across is "How Complex Systems Fail" [1, 2], which talks about designing systems for resiliency, and not for rigid notions of reliability.
[1] "How Complex Systems Fail" https://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sy...
[2] Its accompanying O'Reilly conference talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14
(On mobile) If I grabbed the right link that’s chapter 6 (maybe edited a bit?) of Thinking in Systems. If it interests you you’ll probably like the rest of the book.
Before reading this book, I did not think much about delays but now I try to identify them as soon as possible.
I agree that both of them were not very rigorous, e.g. in terms of making predictions or presenting falsifiable claims. But I enjoyed parts of both.
From Thinking in Systems, I got 2 main things out of it:
- Many systems can be modelled in terms of resources and flows.
- If you want to affect a system, find the leverage points.
But both claims could have been justified more. It feels like the author states them as a given.
Specifically, she doesn't talk much about modelling error. OK, so I came up with a set of resources and flows to model a system. How do I know if it's good? Will it work in some cases and wildly mispredict in others?
I think they just did computer simulations? How did you check it against the real world? I think that was entirely missing from the book. I'd be happy for a correction.
Overall, the book felt like it was incomplete (which is not surprising, given the back story of its publication).
I think I read this book because Bill Gates recommended it. I can understand why he would have liked it. I'm not sure there is much that's actionable for a programmer or software designer, though.
I'd be interested in other takes on it too. Did I miss something? I also wonder why it's so highly thought of. I think it does have a unique point of view, and raises interesting questions, but it also made me wonder if that view is true! It's perhaps too vague to be true or false.
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I enjoyed Systemantics, to a point. The negative view of systems tends to be the more accurate one in my experience ;-)
Any other resource on the topic of system design that you, or anyone reading, could recommend?
If you already have a decent foundation in systems dynamics and thinking, the most valuable part of the book is Chapter 6 (Leverage Points) which is about how to change systems (not control them, but actually drive changes to their structure).
The value of the book, beyond that, is that it's a good introduction to systems dynamics and thinking for people who aren't systems thinkers yet (or nascent systems thinkers who don't have the vocabulary yet). Trying to explain systems thinking to others is hard, surprisingly so. This book serves either as something to give them to read (for those who are motivated to better themselves, surprisingly few in my office) or provides a good set of examples when trying to discuss system dynamics and thinking with those who don't want to (either ever or yet) read something themselves.
The examples aren't esoteric or abstract, they're things that most people can relate to. Which is very helpful. A high level system dynamics book might try and talk too much about the math or structure but using labels like A and B, rather than Oil Reserve or Car Inventory. Leaving out the math (or enough of it) also makes this approachable even to the most math-phobic (and the equations behind the models are all available in an appendix so they're not missing, just shifted to let people focus on the structure and nature rather than formulas and numbers).
Wonder what happens when a manager spends his career perched atop a giant tower with his name on it.
He posits “the hierarchy of mental content, which, in order of increasing value, are: data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.”
Coming from a Shannon-centric view of the world - can someone explain the data/information distinction for me?
Like a series of bits is just data, but by decoding and interpretating them they can become useable information, a number or a string.
Of course, we can turns this on its head:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Marshall_McLuhan
Or rather, like a certain German philosopher did with another certain German philosopher, turn it from standing on its head to standing on its feet.
The distinction is usually dependent on a particular viewpoint. Some sort of interpretation is usually applied to gain information from data. Information are the things relevant and applicable to the task at hand, data (on its own) is not. The data not considered information may be considered noise.
More details[1]
What is the essence of the Yellow value system?
Core Values: Systemic, integral, emergent
Paradigm: Synergy “ I am learning.”
World View: The world is a complex, self-organizing, natural system that requires integral solutions.
Life Motto: “I manifest myself, but not at the cost of others.”
Life Theme: Effective action to support the whole.
Life Philosophy:
I am searching for freedom and embrace (integral) space and complexity.
What is the origin of the Yellow value system?
Period: 50 years ago
Geographical Location: The Western World
Founders: Systems thinking and holists such as, for example, Einstein, Bohm, Wilber and Graves.
In reaction to: At a given point, the Green value system may cause frustration because complex problems that humanity is confronted with cannot solely be solved by consensus and a people-focused way of thinking and living. Moreover, the Green group process takes a lot of time and energy, which can be used in more useful ways. The need to take oneself and the world to the next level causes people to break out of the group and to offer their unique contribution to the world in a complete independent and free way. This is done by combining different existing ideas, theories and models and distilling new connections from them. The world is now seen as an integral whole, in which the value of all value systems is acknowledged. However, some values and manifestations are more suitable and appropriate than others. There’s a freedom from fear, from nature, from the boss, and from others, as one simply does what one needs to do. There’s a new consciousness emerging, which sees life just as life, and that life is an integral part of a big and vast universe in which humans just play a small role.
How do you recognize the presence of Yellow?
Yellow is recognized by the large amount of ideas, connections and complexity that it introduces. Yellow’s starting point is an overarching vision about a system (on an individual, group, organizational, national, planetary and/or cosmic level) and then determines what the system needs to grow and blossom. In order to do so, Yellow will pass by personal and purely human-orientated interests. Yellow is also characterized by an enormous drive and focus (Yellow knows exactly in which direction it wants to move). Yellow has the ability to look far into the future and, at the same time, keep things close at home and integrate the past. Yellow often has visionary and revolutionary ideas about the future.
How do you recognize the absence of Yellow?
There is a lack of focus from a broader perspective. There is no overview or vision about the future. The skill to look at a problem from different angles is lacking. People are “afraid” of chaos and turbulence. Energy does not “flow” and structures and processes exist primarily to keep things as they are. There is not a lot of vision and the issues of the day take up all the energy.
What are the general characteristics of the Yellow value system?
* Overarching view of living systems * View life as a chaotic organism in which change is a constant and in which insecurity is an acceptable way of living * Integrative structures and evolutionary streams * The need to develop natural living environments that support human evolution in a step-by-step and phased way * Integration of head, heart and gut feeling * Focused on both process and content * Moves freely in different value systems * Change is a constant: it’s emergent and about long-term thinking * “Acupunctural interventions”; small actions with a big impact * Personal freedom without harming others or nature * Thinks and acts from an inner-directed core
Sayings
* We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them * Imagination is more important than knowledge * There are no facts, only interpretations * Wisdom is knowing what you do not know * Good wine needs no bush * Do right and fear no one * Turn your hand to anything * The darkest hour is before the dawn * If someone strikes gold, everyone will know