Systems thinking: critical thinking skills for the 1990s and beyond

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122 System Dynamics Review Volume 9 Number 2 Summer 1993Fig. 7. Criticalthinking skillsthe systemsthinkingcontext. That context in education seems most appropriately labeled criticalthinking skills. The seven tracks that I would construe as constitutingsystems thinking skills are depicted in Figure 7.Skill 1: dynamic thinkingDynamic thinking is the ability to see and deduce behavior patterns ratherthan focusing on, and seeking to predict, events. It's thinking aboutphenomena as resulting from ongoing circular processes unfoldingthrough time rather than as belonging to a set of factors. Dynamic thinkingskills are honed by having to trace out patterns of behavior that changeover time and by thinking through the underlying closed-loop processesthat are cycling to produce particular events. Having students think abouteveryday events or newspaper stories in terms of graphs over time wouldbe good exercises for developing their abilities to think dynamically. Alsovery helpful is the use of simple models in real-time exercises in whichstudents are asked to hypothesize what behavior pattern will result when aparticular system is disturbed in a particular way. As an illustration of thiskind of exercise, consider the simple system depicted in Figure 8.In this system, mature trees are harvested. Each time a mature tree isremoved via harvesting, a sapling is instantaneously planted to replace it.Saplings take exactly six time periods to pass through the MaturationPipeline (entering the Mature Trees stock). All saplings mature (none die,all germinate). Given these structural assumptions, next assume thesystem is initially in steady state. This means that (1) mature trees arebeing harvested at the same rate that they're
Richmond: Systems Thinking 123Fig. 8.MaturationpipelinestructureFig. 9. Patternof behaviorbeing planted (by definition, this is true), and (2) that the maturationpipeline is primed up such that trees are entering the Mature Trees stock atthe same rate. Thus, both the stock of Mature Trees and the number oftrees in the Maturation Pipeline are constant. Now, suppose that theharvest rate suddenly steps up to a new higher level and then remains thereforever. What pattern do you think the stock of Mature Trees will traceover time in response to this permanent step increase in the harvest rate?Sketch your guess on the axis provided in Figure 9.In our experience, with widely diverse audiences (across educationlevel, occupation, age, and culture), only about 20 percent of people whoguess at the answer guess correctly. This says something about the levelof our dynamic thinking skills. It also says something about the potentialfor an extremely fruitful union of computer and human. Computers couldnever construct, or "understand," the preceding illustration. However, 100percent of the computer population will correctly deduce the dynamicpattern of behavior that the Mature Trees stock will trace in response to thestep increase in the harvest rate. Combining the human being's ability formaking meaningful structure with the computer's ability for correctlytracing out the dynamic behavior patterns implied by that structure holdsgreat promise for leveraging our capacity for addressing the set ofintractable problems mentioned at the beginning of this article.The correct answer to this illustration, by the way, is that theMature Trees
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