Pandemic is one of my favorite board games. Four players cooperate to stop the spread of four diseases from wiping out the world. Anyone who plays with an ounce of strategy is unknowingly thinking about network effects: prioritize treating the infected cities that have more connections to other cities, target the cities with more disease cubes, …
Our mission is to spread a common language for thinking holistically and engaging in meaningful dialogue about complex systems around us– that language is “Systems Thinking”. Those systems include Education, Healthcare, Food, Energy, Political, Environment, and many more that are challenging to understand but imperative to our well-being. Start by reading our most popular post, or see …
Most of our posts include causal loop diagrams because some things are better expressed with a visual model than in words alone. Systems thinking takes on complex, dynamic systems and how they behave over time, which calls for a different sort of language. This quick tutorial will teach you the basics about reading causal loop …
If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk … Continue reading
As Taiwanese immigrants, my parents owned a small but successful Chinese restaurant in the suburbs north of San Francisco. So while everyone else was out doing whatever kids do on Saturday nights, I’m usually getting first hand experience in the restaurant business by learning everything from waiting tables to preparing food. But the most important … Continue reading
Organizations are expected to thrive in a world that has become increasingly complex. We have more data today than we have the time to understand. Change accelerates faster than we can proactively plan for. And countries, industries, ecosystems are more connected than ever. All this means that it becomes harder to understand how our present … Continue reading
High-growth startup companies live and die by their ability to power Reinforcing Loops for growth. The loop might be for number of users (Facebook), number of reviews (Yelp), number of hosts (AirBnB), number of contributors (Wikipedia), or number of drivers (Uber). If they can’t grow these, they won’t make money. And if they run out … Continue reading
We’ve tackled everything from epidemics, labor unions, and skyrocketing rent prices in San Francisco, but today we’re going to nerd out and talk about games. And when we say games, we’re not talking about game theory or a hypothetical model for decision making. We’re talking about real games. Hardcore games like League of Legends and … Continue reading
This excellent creative video presents a solid introduction to systems thinking for all age groups, told through the lens of Love. If you’ve been looking for ways to communicate systems thinking without jumping too far into technical jargon and complicated visuals, here’s an excellent start. On top of sharing the importance of understanding systems, it briefly … Continue reading
American sports fanatics crowd around their televisions every Monday night to cheer on their favorite buff men tackling each other on Monday Night Football, the most popular cable broadcast on Mondays. Sports fans will study box scores and put their real emotions and money on the line for fantasy sports competitions. This same passionate group can pressure city politicians … Continue reading
