What is a systems approach?
February 18, 2018 9:00 PM   Subscribe

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". That's what we now call a systems approach: that it takes an understanding of all the parts within a system to make complex problems like climate change more easily solvable.

It has long been held that the most significant driver of violence against women is gender inequality. In 2010, the World Economic Forum published a study showing gender equality to be greatest in Iceland. Yet the government’s research there showed violence to be on par with other similarly developed nations. How come it was so prevalent? The problem was that people weren't looking at the problem from the big-picture point of view, as part of a whole.

OECD presents some cool examples here from Iceland, Canada, and Finland of how the systems approach has been successfully used within governments to solve complex issues like domestic violence and to test out new initiatives like universal basic income.

The blog post (in the main link) is a good read and there's more in this longer report.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have thoughts on how an individual could best use a systems approach to improve everyday life, or if you have any other examples of good uses of the systems approach?
posted by oprahgayle (4 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Sorry, but this is a bit mixed up. If you would like to ask members for examples of successful systems approaches, the place to do that is Ask Metafilter. If you'd like to make a post about some examples of neat systems approaches with links to articles, and use the OECD white paper as support background reading, that would work (but keep personal editorial remarks out of the post, please). If you have questions, please contact us. -- taz



 
I teach classes that include a heavy dose of system dynamics and systems thinking. I'm lucky that the topic lends itself so well to play and experimentation. A great free resource is The Systems Thinking Playbook for Climate Change, published on behalf of the German government, includes a lot of simple exercises with varying degrees of fun and depth that get across the systems approach to a clearly systemic problem. Find the original Systems Thinking Playbook if you want a little more breadth and depth.

Separately, my favorite systems thinking article, from a business practice approach, is Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened, a look at a trap that plagues all kinds of resource-limited systems.

Systems thinking previously.
posted by persona at 10:07 PM on February 18, 2018




Well who died and left Aristotle in charge of systems approaches?
posted by elsietheeel at 11:09 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


I use design research methodology to understand the complex adaptive system that is the informal trade and entrepreneurial ecosystem in Eastern Africa with a view to informing the design of strategies, programmes, and interventions that can trigger progressive positive transformation. I also design and adapt the existing tools and methods for the context of the developing country operating environment characterised by variable infrastructure, scarce reliable data and high degree of informality.

tl;dr - where there are no systems that work how would we take a system approach to demand driven development?
posted by infini at 12:03 AM on February 19, 2018


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