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

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120 System Dynamics Review Volume 9 Number 2 Summer 1993potential for compressing space and time. As such, these devices can serveas personal theaters in which virtual realities can be played out. Studentsliterally can have the experience of wandering around in both space andtime, stashing content that has been embedded in appropriate nooks in theelectronics-based learning environment into their intellectual knapsacks asthey go. And the content need not be limited to unadorned statements offact. Video segments, sounds, animation, puzzles, and all other forms ofintellectually stimulating presentations are fair game. What's more, thestudents' wandering need not be choreographed by the teacher. Both thepace and sequence of discovery can be led to the control of the individuallearner or group of learners.In order to elevate a learning environment above the status of avideo game, it is essential that it enable learners to understand why thingshappen. Without this, the interplay between learner and computer can tooeasily deteriorate into "beat the machine." It is encouraging to see that evenwith today's relatively primitive software tools (Richmond et al. 1987;Peterson 1990), a few truly excellent learning environments have beencreated and are now in use (Draper and Swanson 1990; Peterson 1990).And the software tools are improving (see, e.g., Diehl 1990). The resultshave been extremely promising. Students who had previously "gotten offthe bus," tended to get back on. The opportunity to design something (likea mammal, a state park, or a policy for managing an ecosystem) in alearning environment seemed to reset the counters, giving all students achance to succeed once again. Motivation was high, and hence disciplinaryissues for the most part evaporated. Students assimilated content at higherrates, in some cases doing research on their own in order to be able to do abetter job in their design project. At the same time, depth of understandingof the concepts increased, and students' capacity for critical thinking wasenhanced. Students began to think in terms of the long-run, as well as theimmediate, implications of their decisions and actions. They began toanticipate the second- and third-order effects of their choices.These results suggest what is possible when a new learning gestaltcomes together. But even when all three threads—educational process,thinking paradigm, and learning tools—are ripe for fusion within aparticular educational setting, there remains the issue of how to equipteachers with an understanding of the framework, processes, andtechnologies of systems thinking. Let's begin by emphasizing that it is notreasonable to expect teachers, on a wide scale, to stop what they're doingand move en masse to one or more of the institutions of higher learningthat offer formal degrees in system dynamics. Teachers, like most otherpeople, are very busy. And many could not secure the financial resourceseven if they did have the time. Furthermore, there is not sufficient systemdynamics teaching capacity to process such demand. What, then, can bedone to facilitate the fusion process when things are ready to fuse?
Richmond: Systems Thinking 121Aspect 2: transferring the systems thinking framework,process, and toolsI taught system dynamics in the Thayer School of Engineering atDartmouth College for nine years. During this time, I experiencedconsiderable frustration at the fact that after three or more courses even thegood master's student ("good," in this case, being a pretty select breed!)often encountered considerable difficulty in constructing and analyzing amodel from scratch come thesis time. This being the case, what hope wasthere, I used to muse, for any widespread dissemination of systemsthinking?Since leaving Dartmouth three years ago, my colleagues and I atHigh Performance Systems have embarked upon a mission designed toanswer the question, Just how far is it possible to go in cutting theup-to-speed time for the serious, yet not whiz-bang, pilgrim? Now, afteroffering more than 50 workshops for educators, business folk, and allmanner in between—both in the United States and abroad—I do believethat I can say, pretty far! In recent workshops, after two-and-a-half days,participants had produced models from scratch that addressed issues oftheir own choosing. The models were initialized in steady state, had beensubjected to a rigorous testing program to establish robustness, and inmany cases did a credible job of replicating the observed behavior patternof interest. The quality of the better models in terms of "tightness" andinsight-generation capacity was equivalent to what I used to receive from agood master's thesis effort. How was this achieved?First, over the three-year period, we carefully monitoredperformance and continually fed back the results. We maintained noattachment to what we had done in previous workshops. Indeed, weturned over our curriculum materials at least 50 times each (and continue todo so). My intention here is not to summarize this closed-loopevolutionary process. Instead, I wish to stand back from the process andto focus on what we discovered to be the most fundamental barrier tolearning productivity. Simply stated, it is cognitive overload.What has become apparent over the course of the last three years ofworkshops is that doing good systems thinking means operating on atleast seven thinking tracks simultaneously. This would be difficult even ifthese tracks were familiar ways of thinking. But they are not. And theresult in the majority of cases is cognitive overload. Nevertheless, we'vefound that it is possible to take certain steps to prevent people frombecoming overloaded. Specifically, (1) tell people that they're going to beasked to juggle multiple thinking tracks simultaneously; (2) be explicitabout what these tracks are; and (3) align the curricular progression toemphasize development of only one thinking skill at a time.It helps to begin placing the seven systems thinking skills into abroader
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