Thinking about Systems

When three American warships and a merchant vessel were attacked by cruise missiles off the coast of Yemen in 2016, their crews fired off a series of defensive systems which diverted some of the missile.

Brad Yelland, BAE Systems’ engineering director, says Australia produces the world’s best guidance and control technology using a combination of high physics and mathematics capability combined with proper understanding of how systems work, what they’re needed for, what they’ll do and how they’ll function in the environment they’re destined for. ‘My experience is that Australia is much more capable than most countries in the world, the Western world anyway, of truly applying systems thinking to things.’ The Australian-designed CEA phased-array radar system and the JORN over-horizon radar system are more examples of Australian achievements in the same broad area.

Follow along with the eBook: https://goo.gl/1rne9h Follow along with the eBook: https://goo.gl/1rne9h Systems Made Simple is a comprehensive introduction to the area of systems thinking and science that is designed to be accessible to a broad group of people. You can find the full course at: Twitter: https://goo.gl/Nu6Qap Facebook: https://goo.gl/ggxGMT LinkedIn:https://goo.gl/3v1vwF

The neurotransmitter might have helped spur the evolution of social intelligence

As human ancestors got better at cooperating, they shared the know-how for making tools and eventually developed language—all in a feedback loop fueled by surging levels of dopamine. “Cooperation is addictive."

The People's Liberation Army is actively thinking about the weak points of potential adversary’s operational systems.

Systems confrontation is waged not only in the traditional physical domains of land, sea, and air, but also in outer space, nonphysical cyberspace, electromagnetic, and even psychological domains. Whereas achieving dominance in one or a few of the physical domains was often sufficient for warfighting success in the past, systems confrontation requires that “comprehensive dominance” be achieved in all domains or battlefields. Furthermore, within the various battlefields where systems confrontation takes place, the forms of operations and methods of combat have evolved. As a result, operational systems, as conceived by the PLA, must be sufficiently multidimensional and multifunctional to wage war in all of these domains.

As McCambridge writes, “When conversations that are meant to advance the work of nonprofits get stuck, it can take years, even decades, to get them moving again.” So, how can we get—and keep—change-oriented conversations advancing?

Most of us know from experience that when important conversations about our work get stuck in avoidant and self-referential loops, it delays our ability to advance social issues and even our day-to-day practices in our organizations. This is a well-tested tenet of systems thinking, which also advises us that in their tendency to resist change, systems often throw up false signals that detour and fatally delay change efforts. This requires that we remain attentive to the content of the conversations that are helping us to advance our work, and distinguish them from those that would retard progress. There is, of course, a good deal of literature about how we can understand and implement change, but much of it will reflect the following basic structure: What we have (contrasted against) what we want—and how to get from here to there.

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