Thinking about Systems

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There is no description of modernity without functional differentiation. The distinction of function systems such as economy, science, art, or religion, is a key to modernity. Modern science, however, applies and implies rather than studies functional differentiation without providing exact definitions of function systems or investigating how many of these systems actually exist. The present article addresses these two issues focusing on the second.

"We have to keep remembering our purpose. In education it is to grow people and to help society evolve." -- Peter Senge

At the IB Heads World Conference in The Hague, I talked to Peter Senge, the renowned expert on systems, business management and learning, and senior lecturer at MIT. His bestselling book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization, teaches companies how to be smarter by fostering aspiration, developing reflective conversation and understanding complexity. In the interview that follows, he discusses the differences between learning systems in business and education, and why he thinks right now we are having an "Education Renaissance."

As the NHS faces a £2.2billion deficit and another winter A&E crisis, researchers at Brunel University London are to use real data from an NHS region to produce a computer model to help hospital managers plan objectively.

Yahoo has tried to catch up but continues to fail. The reason lies in how Yahoo breaks the 11 laws of systems thinking first put together by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline. These laws comprise a business manual every CEO must know by heart. Here is how Yahoo and Marissa Mayer have broken them:

This Kumu project explains why it can be so hard to fight city hall and bring about change that a community needs and would strive for if given the chance.

What is systems thinking and practice? The essence of systems thinking and practice is in ‘seeing’ the world in a particular way, because how you ‘see’ things affects the way you approach...

‘Applied Minds’ is an engaging look at how engineers think. Madhavan puts it all in context of what he calls modular systems thinking and says it controls our lives whether we like it or not: Look out an airplane window from four miles up, he says, and you’ll see two systems — the one designed by nature and the one designed by engineers.

Our new Google Sheets integration allows you to build maps using the data within an online spreadsheet. This is great for crowdsourcing maps, especially when you need to get lots of people up and running quickly and you'd rather not...