Hindsight is not 20/20. We never see the whole story. “Complex systems... may appear to be ordered and tractable when looking back with hindsight. In fact, they are increasingly unordered and intractable.” From Steven Shorrock skybrary.aero/index.php/Tool…

Linear causality is a tiny pinhole through which to observe the universe. Circularity helps us make sense of things even as it makes our picture more complicated: systemsthinking.dev/2021/03/08/cir…

When you try to change behavior without changing the system, the system wins -- JK

4/5 #systemsthinking Systems Thinking does not claim any monopoly of good ideas but is an approach which embraces families of interconnected good ideas and prompts the thinker to recognise and exploit the better ideas for their situation.

Team culture, network effects, tantrums, and why Chelsea Troy @[email protected] has too many owls: a systems pattern buff.ly/3dxVapC

Circular causality

A shift to Open Systems Theory “imposes the additional task on [an organization] of aligning their own purposes with the purposes of the wider society and also with the purposes of their members.” - Trist, quoted by Jackson in Critical Systems Thinking

“Attempts to optimize for either the technical or social system alone will result in the suboptimization of the socio-technical while.” - Trist, quoted by Jackson in Critical Systems Thinking This is why Agile without XP coding practices doesn’t make sense.

A ten-principle checklist for socio-technical design by Albert Cherns, quoted by Jackson in Critical Systems Thinking paraphrased by me, with commentary for software teams 🧵