Why should I care about Systems Thinking?

How to find solutions to the status quo - we are in a polycrisis

The global polycrisis has occurred because crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity's prospects.

Fritjof Capra  emphasises that advanced "...systems thinking will be critical in order to solve the major problems of our time, which are systemic ones–all interconnected and interdependent.

We need an update of our global economic operating system because its systemic flaws are interconnected. 

Not only are they interconnected and interacting, they produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, to name a few:

1. Our economy's unsustainable growth: valuing quantity over quality and sustainability of growth;

2. Overconsumption: consuming unequally, beyond our planetary means;

3. Linear economy: a take-make-waste production and consumption model;

4. Financial capital myopia: overvaluing financial and undervaluing everything else.

5. Our way of operating remains one of short-termism—a structural and cognitive focus on the present at the expense of the future—and siloed thinking: approaching complex, interconnected issues in isolation.

"We urgently need to put life at the centre of our businesses, economy, technologies, physical structures, and social institutions."

Fritjof Capra

Lightbulb change

Here is an idea: Instead of basing the economy on the de-generation of nature, let’s flip the model…and base it on re-generation. WHY?

Because:

• We spend $7 trillion a year on extracting and depleting our natural resources and $200 billion on nature based solutions.
• That’s spending 35 times more on degrading what we depend on instead of sustaining it.
• This is primarily because we don’t VALUE nature the same way as we would gold or oil.
• What if we perceived it differently?

"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims...You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

HOW? The systems principles of life

First of all let us understand what we are trying to learn from:

"The first step in this endeavour must be to become ecologically literate – that is, to understand the principles of organisation that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life."

Based on 40 years of research in physics, biology, and many other science-based and sociological fields, Fritjof Capra established the four principles of life:  These four principles are summarised here:

Principle 1: life organises itself in networks

Principle 2: life is inherently regenerative

Principle 3: life is inherently creative

Principle 4: life is inherently intelligent

To read an explanation of Capra's principles of life, click on Fritjof Capra Systems Thinking and/or his course The Systems View of Life.

"One can study a caterpillar forever and never be able to predict a butterfly."  Buckminster Fuller

Where From Here?

1. For an explanation of systems thinking, go to the section:   WHAT is systemic thinking?
2. APPLICATIONS of systems thinking to the 'real' world,
   • Sections on the Economy, Business, and Health
3. Also check out the KNOWLEDGE BASE, where you will find all references for this section. This section is changing always, and it added to constantly.

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