About – Our Quest

Writing Canada’s Systems Thinking History

Gathering together systems thinker personal biographies, learning activities and projects from the past and present can be a first step toward fleshing out the continuously unfolding story of the systems thinking discipline in Canada. There are several benefits of doing this, stated in no particular order of importance.

One: It highlights the international nature of Canadian context collaborations during the first decades of development of systems sciences. See the STVIC Full In Tribute Archive to meet some of the central figures and learn about their contributions to systems thinking at ground zero.

Two: It sheds light on how systems thinking has influenced Canadian context projects constructively in the past with longstanding benefits.

Three: Recognition of these positive impacts strengthens the stance for more intentional public learning of systems thinking skills in more sectors of today’s society.

Four: A more widely useful body of hindsight knowledge can be gained from evaluating a project’s short-term and long-term consequences in which the systems thinking approach has been applied in Canada. See The Banff Bow Valley Study: A Retrospective Review

Five: The Canadian context systems thinking community includes and is not limited to First Nations, Inuit and Metis voices, Western/European voices, Eastern/Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern and African voices. Due to one of Systems Thinking’s foundational features as a common language (lingua franca), there is opportunity for more seamless communication and recognition of compatible overlap within historically diverse worldviews. Let the Empathic Thinking excerpt below by Barry Richmond help cultivate a rich community of mutually caring, dignified, respectful systems thinkers!

Empathic Thinking

“The capacity for both giving and receiving feedback on mental models is vital if we want to get better at bootstrapping each others’ learning! Many skills are involved in boosting this capacity, including listening, articulating, and in particular, empathizing capabilities. Wanting to empathize increases efforts to both listen and articulate clearly. Being able to empathize is a skill that can be developed – and in some ways, is the ultimate Systems Thinking skill because it leads to extending the boundary of true caring beyond self (a skill almost everyone could use more of). By continually stretching the horizontal perspective, Systems Thinking works covertly to chip away at the narrow self-boundaries that keep people from more freely empathizing.

But even with heightened empathic skills, we need a language that permits effective across-boundary conversations in order for communications to get very far. And this is where the issue of a content-focused curriculum resurfaces as a limiting factor. Even if time were made available in curriculum for student-to-student feedback on mental models, and empathy were present in sufficient quantity, disciplinary segmentation would undermine the communication process. Each discipline has its own vocabulary, and in some cases its own set of symbols. This makes it difficult for many students to master all of the dialects (not to mention the associated content!) well enough to feel confident in, and comfortable with sharing their reflections. The stock/flow Esperanto associated with Systems Thinking can play an important role in raising the students’ level of both comfort and confidence in moving freely across disciplinary boundaries.”

Richmond, Barry. “Chapter One”, An Introduction to Systems Thinking, Copyright 2013 iseesystems, Inc., p. 30