The old adage, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail” can also apply to language.

This year’s annual Systems Thinking in Action Conference explored both the promise and the reality of the learning organization through the theme, “Learning Organizations…

The systems thinking community has always considered stock and flow diagrams to be important tools, and recognition of their key place in the…

Distinguish Between Actual and Perceived Conditions Perceptions and reality often differ, and it is usually important to capture these differences in your causal diagrams. The…

Consider any complex, potentially volatile issue — Arab-Israeli relations; the problems between the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians; the U.S. deficit, healthcare costs, or labor/management…

For the past 15 years, I have focused all of my attention on answering one question: How can we solve our toughest problems peacefully?…

Every so often in the world of business, we see an enterprise that, after years of steady progress and growth, suddenly experiences a drastic…

How we act depends on how we understand the situation we are in. Our understandings often seem obvious to us, as if they were…

Although we usually refer to ourselves as “human beings,” the truth is, if we closely analyzed our behavior, we’d likely describe ourselves as “human…

You have probably already learned about the importance of distinguishing among events, patterns, and structure. But still, you may be finding it difficult to…