What barriers are contributing to the lag in public awareness about Systems Thinking’s true historical and steadily growing positive impact on Canadian society?
The term systems thinking‘ sounds cold, “brainy” and mechanistic to many people. Systems thinking also has an outer optic of being difficult and time consuming to master before its multiple benefits become evident to the learner.
Or possibly for reasons outlined below by Everett Rogers, is this a typical pace for cultural acceptance of an unfamiliar style of thinking?
“Rogers finds that diffusion (spread of ideas) is driven by the benefits of innovations. Diffusion is slowed down and hindered by four main factors: complexity (theoretical and hard to understand), lack of compatibility (with existing ideas and practices), lack of observability (relying on theory rather than practice), and lack of trialability (difficult to try out ideas in own environment). Together, all these factors create uncertainty and risk of failure that slow down the adoption of new ideas. These factors must be kept in mind when communicating systems thinking to people from different backgrounds.”
Excerpt from “System Dynamics Modeling and Analysis”, University of Bergen, MOOC Portal, Course GEO-SD662. (Originally sourced from Diffusion of Innovations, author Everett Rogers)
