Web of Wonder Getting Deep into ST – Systems Thinking Certification

I am currently participating in the STIA (Systems Thinking in Action) Online Certification Program, guided by Gene Bellinger, most recently cited in, “How Do I Make Use of this Systems Thinking Stuff?” in Creating New Community Paradigms”. The platform for the lessons is Kumu, a web-based data visualization tool. I to write about what I take out of the class. What it won’t do is repeat the teachings of the class. Many of these lessons can also be found in Beyond Connecting the Dots. The difference is that with the class lines up differently than the book in terms of presentation and the interaction is more two way. Kumu lays out the course content, through YouTube videos or InsightMaker models.

The first section does not begin with systems thinking in its own right. Instead, it asks you to shift your perspective of the world from how it is usually presented as a machine subject to being broken down into smaller pieces and therefore controllable with the right levers. Instead, it asks you to look at your world as an interrelated system or a series of systems. The emphasis, at this point, is not on whether the world is a single system or multiple systems, rather it is on how we approach the nature of such a system.

All of this is seen as creating a Web of Wonder, serving as the port from which the next part of the journey will be taken, an Overview of System Thinking.

“We live in a world much like a giant spider web, where everything is connected to everything else. When something changes in one part of the web it ripples though the entire web. We tend to live in the moment, not realizing how our actions ripple over time through distant parts of the web. When we don’t understand the web, things around us seem extremely complicated, confusing, and overwhelming. We feel caught in the web. What we need is a web of understanding for this web of extended interactions.

Gene Bellinger

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Getting Deep into ST – Systems Thinking Certification

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