The practice of thinking as a system, known as Systems Thinking, has become extremely important for individuals before organizations! Because this type of thinking, as described by Peter Senge, is a process that takes all aspects of a situation or problem into account in order to understand the system as a whole. This helps to see the root causes of problems, the relationships, connections, and parts between them, thus providing a comprehensive view of these problems to reach comprehensive solutions.

Incidentally, the first to address this concept was Professor Jay Forrester, who recognized the need for a better way to test new ideas in social systems, in the same way that ideas are tested in engineering, to develop an understanding of social systems and work to improve them using the same methods as engineering principles.

In simple terms, it can be said that Systems Thinking is the ability to transform your way of thinking into models (such as mind maps) to understand complex relationships. In even simpler terms, and to convert all of the above into applicable elements, there are four skills that must be developed to achieve Systems Thinking for an individual.

1. Cause and Effect: The foundation of Systems Thinking is that the individual is aware that they are thinking in clear models, and has the ability to build and analyze them. Building models is closely related to simple cause-and-effect relationships. Therefore, the individual must develop their skill in analyzing cause and effect to reach a real and main cause for the result they obtained.

2. Connection and Relationship: The second skill to develop after cause-and-effect is the skill of understanding direct and indirect connections, and complex and causal relationships. Because analyzing a situation or problem requires knowing the strength of the connection and the type of relationship. For example, the cause of a child's mental disability cannot be attributed solely to a defect in the normal growth of nerve cells, but rather to the reciprocal relationships of processes related to the system as a whole, and so on with many events, phenomena, and problems.

3. Part and Whole: Linear thinking based on single cause-and-effect contradicts Systems Thinking, which is circular thinking that develops the individual's ability to have a comprehensive view of a topic without losing its details, as well as developing the ability to analyze and synthesize, understanding the relationship of the whole to the part and the relationships among parts themselves, and the relationship of each to the overall situation, not merely analyzing details and assembling them.

4. The Near and Far Horizons: As we mentioned, Systems Thinking is circular, not linear, and it is also network thinking that links the past and the future, connecting past experiences and their impact on the future. Therefore, Systems Thinking does not focus only on present results, because they may be excellent outcomes in the near term, but if studied over the long term, the results could be opposite. Hence, solutions should be studied on the long term before the short term.

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