TABLE OF CONTENTS We must dare to think about "unthinkable things," because when things become "unthinkable," thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
Speech, U.S. Senate, J. William Fulbright, March 25, 1964
Systems thinking is not new; it has been around for thousands of years in many different guises. Ancient creation myths were instances of systems thinking. Operations analysis, systems analysis, failure analysis, risk analysis, corporate benefit analysis, financial modeling, quantity surveying, investment appraisal, finite element analysis, civil engineering models, economic modeling, simulations, and many more are all modern ways of thinking about systems. Imaginative visualization should be on the list, too.
What is new, perhaps, is the ready availability of powerful desktop tools that permit and enable us to think about the most complex and complicated issues and systems. Processors allow us to tackle problems of such complexity and magnitude that, without them, we would be obliged to guess. The same tools reveal unexpected complex behavior from simple systems.
To avoid guessing, some confine their activities to a relatively simple, straightforward world of linear, singular cause and effect. Physics and engineering have, in the past, been examples of this classification, associated as it is with a mechanistic view of the world.
Before the advent of the processor, and its ability to repeat experiments hundreds and thousands of times, emphasis rested on the development of...
