Inventing Elephants

A few things that caught my attention while I was wasn't blogging... mostly variations on thinking methods.

Design Thinking

Lessons Learned - Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking really hit home for me. I had noticed the overlap between the two and was fascinated by Fred Collopy's vantage point as being a student of both.

Essentially he points out that systems thinking requires mastering many similar disciplines and also following an arbitrary set of shared defintions, but that we learn best, and are most excited by learning, when we can jump in and try things out.

The key suggestion is to make design thinking approachable by creating within it a collection of useful tools that do NOT depend on each other. I wonder if this could also be done for systems thinking, or if that would defeat the point.

If you go read the article, make sure to follow the discussion into the comments. The're worth the extra time.

Systematic Inventive Thinking

This post about becoming greener is also about cognitive fixedness, a precise term to describe having a mental block. The three ways that the SIT team recommends to break it up are to:

• recognize the limitation
• accept that underlying assumptions can be changed
• be flexible about relationships between elements

They have their own blog and a company site by the same name. It's apparently a way to approach innovation, step by step, using systems in the sense of having a regular process. I'd like to a little more closely at their ways to come up with something new.

Natural Systems Thinking Process

I had no idea there was anything called ecopsychology. This article popped up because I have a google alert on "systems thinking" but the only part of NSTP that seems familiar is the idea of everything being interconnected, instead it focuses more on the emotional and natural aspects of the "web of life" and not on increasing understanding overall.

Resilience Thinking

Much of this article flew by me, but I caught enough to want to follow up on the idea later. Garry Peterson describes resilience thinking, in part, as being a deliberatively subjective look at systems. Instead of trying to map it out objectively, you're trying to look at what you can see from the different perspectives in order to get a fuller picture, even in disagreement.

And a little more...

Chris Jones muses about the definition, history, and implications of considering paradigms - the way we describe and understand things. As a side note, Paradigm 101 isn't part of a blog, but part of a wiki set up for Chris's consulting company. I hadn't seen this tack taken in an individual's online publishing before and find it interesting